by Alan Ryker
He didn’t know, but he really wanted to stop thinking about it.
So after he’d loaded his pickup with supplies from the Milfield Co-Op, he didn’t hop back on County 1 and head home. He sat in the gravel lot, hands on the wheel.
When they needed groceries, clothes or an afternoon at the movies, they went to Lockton. But Milfield was the closest town, only five minutes away, and it’s where Pete felt at home. It was a tenth the size, and full of hardworking farm folk.
Pete decided to stop in the Branding Iron Café and get a sweet roll and some coffee. It beat going home to his crazy mother and bitchy wife.
He shook his head at the malicious thought. It had jumped into his consciousness before he could restrain it. But why should he?
Because it wasn’t fair. Each of them was suffering in their own particular way. Kathy was trying. She really was.
There it was again, the thinking. He started his truck, crunched his way out of the co-op lot and headed down the road towards the café.
10 AM was between the breakfast and lunch crowds, when the good old boys sat around sipping endless cups of coffee and escaping the chores of their pestering wives. Pete immediately felt among kindred spirits. Everyone turned at the clanking of the little tin bell overhead, and Pete received and returned a bunch of nods and waves.
But as people continued to watch him, his feeling of comfortable camaraderie evaporated. The men mostly pretended they weren’t interested, only giving sidelong glances. A group of women near the back, though, whispered to each other and stared, a circle of conspiring cotton swabs.
“Pete!” a bent little man yelled from the counter. Beneath the bill of John’s yellow Caterpillar ball cap, huge watery eyes swam behind enormous glasses. “Come sit over here!”
John didn’t yell just to get Pete’s attention, but also because of the hearing aids with batteries that were always either dead or low.
John had been a good friend of Pete’s dad, and of his grandfather, Piotr Grzych, and he had always shown a huge fondness for Pete. A smile immediately filled Pete’s face. He crossed the café, shook the old, hooked hand and patted John on the back.
“How you doing, old timer?”
“Not too bad, except I can’t get used to this decaf the doc’s got me on. I wish I hadn’t told Clara about it, because she won’t give me any of the good stuff no matter how much I beg.”
The counter was clean, but Clara wiped the space before Pete anyway. “Hey, Pete. Things going okay?”
The question seemed loaded, like it wasn’t just a pleasantry. Maybe it was just his imagination, but Pete decided that even if it wasn’t, he’d ignore it.
“Doing pretty good. Wish we’d get some rain.”
“I hear you. This is terrible,” Clara said, shaking her head. “How about some coffee instead?” She gave a weak smile. It sounded like a line she gave a hundred times a day.
“That sounds good. And a sweet roll.”
She poured a steaming cup of strong, black coffee then went to get the sweet roll. Pete stirred in two sugars and three creams.
“You might as well have ordered a pop!” John said. He always teased Pete about how he took his coffee.
Clara sat the warm sweet roll in front of Pete. It was big, gooey, and intended to be eaten with a fork, which Pete promptly set to doing, following a big bite with a gulp of hot coffee.
Delicious.
“How’s your ma?” John asked.
Pete could sense the inevitable closing in, but decided to try one last evasion. “She’s doing pretty good. You know how it is.”
“I do. I do. But I heard she took a pretty bad tumble. She doing okay?”
Even under the best circumstances, John was loud. Now it seemed to Pete as if his voice boomed like thunder across the diner, which had grown quiet.
Pete looked over his shoulder, and men dropped their eyes to their coffees. The table of old biddies stared back unabashedly.
If Pete hadn’t ordered anything, he could have said he’d just stopped in to say hi. Now, he was stuck sitting there with a big sweet roll in front of him, and the bite he’d taken sitting in his gut like a brick.
“She’s actually doing really well.”
“What was that?”
“She’s doing really well!”
“Well, that’s good news. A fall can do you in at our age. You young folks don’t know it yet, but you will. You remember Nora?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what got her. Broke her hip. Never healed right. Got infected.”
“I remember. Very sad.”
John nodded, but said, “We all check out one way or another.”
“Very true.”
“So what’s this about them kicking her out of her home?”
Pete willed himself to fall over dead. It didn’t work. “They thought it’d be good if she stayed with family for awhile.” He picked at the sweet roll with his fork.
“Wiktor and your ma, they never asked for nothing from the government. Then the government comes in and tells her how to live? It’s not right.”
Pete could only nod as blood filled his face.
“Old people have earned the right to live how they want,” John continued, an unstoppable juggernaut of tactlessness. “If they like having lots of stuff, they should get to. If they want to let the housekeeping go, they’re not hurting anyone. She’s a spring chick compared to me. I don’t do any more than I have to, I’m not ashamed to admit.”
Pete stood and pulled a five from his wallet. He set it on a counter he could barely see through the pinpricks his eyesight had narrowed down to. “You have a good one,” he said to John, Clara, everyone and no one, and he walked out the door.
Thankfully, he hadn’t parked directly in front of the café windows. He sat for a moment, letting his heart rate and breathing slow. It took a minute, but soon Pete was calm enough to drive home.
* * *
Outside his home he found a sheriff’s cruiser. He nearly backed out and drove away.
“When it rains…” he said. He scanned the sun-bleached landscape and snorted bitterly.
Inside, he found two deputies sitting at his kitchen table, talking with Kathy. They stood. Neither of them was nearly as large as Pete, though one was a little taller. They were young, neither yet thirty. Each sported a buzz cut and a mustache.
“Mr. Grish?” the shorter one said, holding out a hand.
“Yes. What’s this about?”
“You took a bit longer than I thought,” Kathy said.
“I stopped at the café for a minute. What’s this about?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing to do with you. I’m Deputy Rogers. This is Deputy Donaldson. We’re here checking on a missing person report. No one has seen Bryce Hardin in a bit over forty-eight hours.”
Pete didn’t know what he’d expected, but with all the recent trouble, he assumed this was more of the same. He felt a bit ashamed of his brusqueness. “Bryce Hardin? I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”
“The reason we’re here is that the last anyone has seen of him he was leaving the entomology lab at Kansas State University, headed for your mother’s place.”
So his previous view hadn’t been pessimistic after all. “Why’s that?”
“They said they received samples of some new bug reportedly found in her house, and he was there to get more. But he never returned.”
“Huh, that is weird. Do you need me to take you over there to look around?”
“We’ve already been. Because the property is condemned, we didn’t need permission. But we didn’t have the gear to look around much. We’ll exhaust all other avenues first.” Deputy Rogers spoke neither with apology nor reprobation in his voice, but his matter-of-fact tone around a delicate situation bothered Pete. “If his vehicle were there, we’d be worried.”
“Worried?”
“That he’d fallen through the floor or gotten otherwise trapped or injured. But his
vehicle isn’t there. No one was at the house two days ago, correct?”
“No. My mother’s been with us all week,” Pete said. His mother had escaped to her house two days ago, but she couldn’t have had anything to do with this, and he wasn’t about to increase his headache by bringing it up.
Deputy Rogers nodded. “Your wife explained that. And you haven’t noticed anything strange? Haven’t seen any wrecked or abandoned cars in the area? He drives a powder-blue Buick sedan.”
Pete shook his head. “No, can’t say that I have.”
“Okay then. We’re done here. I already gave your wife a card. The case number is on the back. If you do discover something, please give us a call.”
“Will do. Sorry we couldn’t be more help.”
“Thanks for the coffee, Ma’am,” Deputy Donaldson said as they went out the front door.
Pete closed the door and hesitated for a tired moment before turning to face his wife’s anger.
“Did your mother have anything to do with this?”
“She’s a tiny, sick septuagenarian. What could she have had to do with this?”
“’Septuagenarian’? Have you ever noticed that your vocabulary goes way up when you get upset?”
“Well, these are upsetting times,” he said. His hand was still on the door knob. He turned it and found himself leaving the house. “I’m going out to my shop.”
He didn’t feel like doing any real work. Instead, he went to his bench, where he’d left a big picture of a Power Ranger drying on a piece of wood. He’d found the poster hanging out of a comic book Teddy had apparently tired of looking at and tossed across the room. Teddy was no longer interested in the infantile subjects of wooden puzzles, but wasn’t yet old enough for cardboard puzzles. So, with plans to make Teddy a wooden puzzle about his very favorite subject in the whole world, Pete took the image, glued it to a piece of scrap wood and sealed it.
He tapped a finger against it. No tackiness. He took the board over to his band-saw, farther into the shop. He was about to flip it on when he noticed a strange, low noise, and cocked an ear toward the back of the shop.
A low growl emanated from the dark corner.
He’d found possums and feral cats plenty of times in the shop, attracted to the remnants of food in tin cans or the rodents that food brought. But this sound was different. It was deep. Whatever was growling sounded big.
Pete thought about going back to the house for a gun, but decided that would be overreacting, and also didn’t want to explain it to Kathy. Still, he grabbed a shovel, which he held like a spear as he slowly worked his way back through the machinery, into the old furniture and finally into what could really only honestly be described as trash.
“Peter?”
Pete spun toward the voice then tried to calm himself from a useless burst of adrenaline.
“Mom? What the hell are you doing out here?”
She sat on the concrete floor, leaning back against moldering boxes of magazines, surrounded by tin cans. She looked dazed, like she’d just woken up from a dream. “I like it out here.”
Pete scanned the dark corners. “I thought I heard an animal back here.”
“You know what? I think I’d fallen asleep. Maybe I was snoring.”
“Mom, this is crazy. You need to stay in the house.” He walked forward and extended a hand, but she smacked it away.
“I don’t like your house.”
Pete nearly snapped. She lived in a trash heap, and she didn’t like his house? It was all too much. The scene at the diner, finding the police in his home, the arguments with Kathy…It was too much. But he closed his eyes, set his jaw, and breathed through his nose until he was calm enough to not shout.
“I’m sorry you don’t like it. We can talk about how to make it better for you, but let’s talk inside.”
Instead of offering a hand, this time he leaned down and reached for her upper arm. So he was off balance when she exploded from the ground, and he fell over as she rammed past him.
She was already racing out the door by the time he got back to his feet.
Outside, he looked toward his nice little home, but didn’t think for a moment that she’d gone in that direction. He ran around the shop and stared across the pasture to her house.
She sprinted across the field like he’d never seen anyone run before, including when he’d played high school football. Instead of stopping to open the gate into her yard, she vaulted it.
He could think of nothing to do but follow after her.
Minutes later, drenched in sweat, he tried to open her front door. It was locked, but he still had his key.
Pete made the mistake of stepping inside while he was still gasping for breath. He turned, ran back into the yard and vomited. The stench was even worse than it had been before, something he hadn’t thought possible. And a sight filled his mind as he stared at the dusty ground with his hands on his knees: a dead cat exploded open atop a pile of trash by the open door.
The cats must have gone cannibal in the absence of their owner. The image refused to leave his brain, and though he wanted to not see it any more, he had to wonder exactly what had caused those odd wounds.
“Mom!” he shouted from the porch.
There was no reply, except maybe the faintest hint of the same low growl he’d sworn he’d heard in his shop.
“Mom, get out here!”
Still no reply. He went back inside.
It took several moments for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He breathed shallowly. The smell churned his roiling stomach, but he couldn’t force himself to breathe through his mouth as the palpable feel of the air on the wet surfaces instantly brought vomit to the top of his throat.
The path that had once wound through the house had collapsed. Pete began climbing. Boxes flattened suddenly beneath his heavy boots, and he attempted to catch himself on magazines that slid away. He landed chest down on things he didn’t want to identify.
It must have been the sound of someone ruining her precious trash that brought his mother out into the main room. She scrabbled from the hallway with no more fear of gravity than a spider.
“This is goddamn ridiculous. Come on. You can’t stay here. How could you even want to stay here?”
“You understand,” she said. She twitched as if she were controlling something, but only barely. It flashed on and off behind her eyes, but her body remained uniformly tense.
Pete knew she was talking about his shop. He thought about explaining, but he wasn’t the subject at hand. He shouldn’t feel the need to defend himself at that moment. He couldn’t talk anymore. He crawled forward.
Her tense muscles exploded. She burst forward from the hallway and smashed into his chest, knocking him backward. He rolled and slid all the way down to the front door.
“Go now. Don’t come back.”
She squatted beside the exploded cat, twitching once again. Sunlight hit one forearm, and the veins bulged against her thin, pale skin.
Pete got to his feet, and his mother’s twitching intensified. “If you don’t leave here with me, I’m going to call the police.”
“I’ll kill them,” she hissed.
And looking into her eyes, Pete knew with absolute certainty that she would. He thought of the one shotgun of his father’s that he’d left her for home defense.
Shaking his head, he stepped out into the fresh air and blazing sunshine. The door slammed shut behind him.
* * *
Pete managed to get inside and into the shower without seeing Kathy. He held his disgusting clothes away from his body as he made his way to the utility room to shove them under his other dirty laundry.
“You ready for lunch?” Kathy asked.
“Yeah.” Pete was sad and bewildered, but also hungry. The adrenaline that had scorched through his system left him feeling completely drained. “What’s there to eat?”
“Meatloaf sandwiches?”
“That sounds great.”
“Okay
, let me just go ask your mom what she wants and I’ll fix them.”
Pete started to speak. He started to tell her that his mom wasn’t there in the house; that she’d escaped. That she’d growled like an animal? That she’d beaten him up? That he truly believed her when she said that she’d kill anyone who tried to take her from her home?
“I just checked on her. She’d like some time alone. I think she’s feeling overwhelmed.” It was easy enough to come up with the words. Pete just described how he felt. “I’ll take her lunch to her.”
Kathy shrugged. “Okay.”
They ate lunch in the family room, watching a game show. Pete had sat his mother’s lunch on Junior’s bed, and supposed he’d eat it before he went back out.
As Kathy gathered up their plates, she said, “Now you boys need to be quiet and not bother Grandma. She’s not feeling well.”
“We don’t know where Grandma is,” Junior said.
“She’s in her room.”
“No, she’s not.”
Pete felt panic again grip his heart in an electric fist as Kathy gave him a strange look, then went down the hallway. She returned holding a plate with an untouched meatloaf sandwich.
“You boys need to go play in Teddy’s room,” she said.
“But we wanna—”
“Now!”
The discussion was not a pleasant one. Kathy wanted to call Rebecca, the social worker. Pete explained that if the authorities became involved, his mother wouldn’t go without a fight. She might eventually listen to him, but she wouldn’t listen to anyone else, which was true. He said that she was safe for the moment, which was less true, but he could say it because Kathy hadn’t actually been over to see the condition of his mother’s house.
“You know how much healthier she’s gotten since we took her out of there,” Kathy said.
