by Laurel Dewey
“How come you don’t want to talk about it?”
“It’s nothing,” she whispered as she jotted down a few rushed words to Millie and Larry.
Harlan used tacks he found in a bowl to attach the dishrag to the wooden slats between the glass panes. “Nothing?”
She finished the note and laid out two crisp one hundred bills. “That’s right. Nothing. Grab the blankets and let’s get out of here.”
They walked out to the Mustang. Jane swept up the cooler and gathered up any uneaten food or packaging she could find into a trash bag she uncovered from the backseat. Once inside the car, she considered their next move.
“I have no clue how we’re going to get more food. I gotta keep this car off the radar for now.”
Harlan was working his big frame into his usual spot on the backseat. “Well…it’s farm country down there, ain’t it?” Harlan stated, jutting his chubby chin toward the road they drove up on. “Let’s find a farm.”
It was the most intelligent idea she had heard out of his mouth. Jane backed out of the driveway and headed down the narrow mountain road. Once they hit the lowlands, the high mountain snow was gone, replaced by miles of glistening, grassy fields and acres of well-turned dirt, patiently waiting for a seed. The Sangre de Cristo mountain range lay in the distance, as the early morning sun warmed Jane’s face. After driving twenty minutes, Harlan spoke up.
“How come I feel so sad?”
“You said that last night when we drove through here.”
“I know. I feel like my heart is breaking.” He looked up at the passing scenery. “Hey! Up ahead there? Take that right turn where the sign is.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Just do it.”
Jane reluctantly agreed, checking her rearview mirror to make sure no one was following her. Less than one mile down the gravel road he told her to stop. There was a small family farm about a quarter mile away, shrouded in a fence of cottonwood trees.
“We’re gettin’ out here,” he declared.
“Hey, hey, hey! Are you nuts? It’s open season on you!”
He sat up. “Farmer’s season! You know what that is, right? No license to kill needed. You just shoot whatever wanders onto your property when you’re sittin’ on your porch.” He smiled a goofy grin. “Come on, Jane. You’re hungry, right?”
“What’s in the field?”
“I ain’t sure yet. Come on.”
She was hungry and so she grudgingly agreed. Sliding under the barbed wire fence that surrounded the moist field, they wandered for several yards before Harlan reached down and snapped up something.
“Wild asparagus!” he yelled.
“Shhh!”
“Ain’t nobody around, Jane.”
“There’s a farm over there.”
“Who cares?”
“You care, Harlan! You might feel invincible but you’re not. I bet you’re now worth more than that twenty-five thousand dollar bounty.”
“Yeah? You think?” he said proudly.
Jane shook her head. “Jesus, you are one goofy fucker.” She came upon an unexpected cluster of wild asparagus and eagerly snatched it up. While it wasn’t clear how Harlan knew this field existed, she wasn’t going to bitch about free produce.
Harlan stayed close to her but kept his head down, searching in the vibrant spring grass. “You ever notice how when you’re huntin’ for wild asparagus, how it blends in with the blades of grass? It’s kinda like a camo plant. You can be hoverin’ over it, starin’ right at it, and not see it. Wild asparagus is a very sneaky vegetable.” He looked down in front of him. “Hot damn! I found me the mother lode, Jane!” He snapped up the tender stalks, occasionally chewing on a few to test them. After several minutes in silence, he turned to Jane. “How come you said he was nothin’?”
Jane stopped in her tracks. “I never said it was a ‘he.’”
Harlan looked at her in a strange daze. “But it was a ‘he.’”
She stared at him. “Why is this so important to you?”
“’Cause I saw the look in your eyes last night. You took it personal. You couldn’t save him and you’ll be damned if anybody else is gonna do you like that again.” He waited but Jane remained taciturn. “When you say it’s ‘nothin,’ I don’t believe you, Jane. I think you call things ‘nothin,’ ‘cause you don’t want to feel no more pain. But that don’t mean it ain’t still there.”
“What do you want, Harlan?” Her tone was abrupt.
“You see, right there? That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Kinda knee-jerk. You gonna attack me before I attack you—”
“I’m not attacking you.”
“And I ain’t attackin’ you. I’m just askin’ you a simple question.”
She hesitated and then spoke. “He was my boyfriend from college.”
Harlan waited. “Yeah…Okay…Go on. What was his name?”
Jane snapped the end off an asparagus stalk. “Mark.”
“And you loved him, right?”
Jane sighed. “We were mutually attracted to each other because of our shared addictions.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Jane. Did you love him?”
“Yes. I made that mistake.”
“Mistake? How can lovin’ someone be a mistake?”
“Because when you love someone, you don’t let that person find you with a bullet in your brain! That’s not love!” Her voice caught with emotion.
Harlan looked at her cockeyed. “You think Mark killed himself ‘cause he didn’t love you?”
She trod through the grass in search of more wild produce. “I don’t need to hear you say his name.”
Harlan stood still as Jane circled the meadow. “Mark…Mark…”
She spun around. “What in the fuck are you doing?”
“Why are you afraid of hearin’ his name?”
She strode toward Harlan with angry purpose. “I don’t talk about him. I don’t think about him. So, shut the fuck up! It was a long time ago—”
“Hell, it can’t be that long. You ain’t more than…what? Forty-four? Forty-five?”
“I’m thirty-seven!”
“Really? Damn.”
“Fuckin’ take me out of my misery,” she mumbled under her breath.
“If you’re truly thirty-seven, we’re only talkin’ fourteen or so years ago. That ain’t a long time, Jane. And you’re lyin’ when you say you don’t think about him. You don’t talk about him but you sure do think about him.”
“Jesus! When I tell someone to shut the fuck up, they usually comply.”
“Well, that’s probably ‘cause you got a loaded gun to their head,” he offered, matter-of-factly.
She looked at him perplexed. “Why are you doing this, Harlan? Why do you care about any of this?”
“’Cause I like you and I think you deserve a good life. Maybe the first thirty-seven years could have been better but that don’t mean the next thirty-seven are gonna hit the crapper.”
“Nice. Real quaint. You ought to write greeting cards.”
“And you oughta call Hank.”
The comment came out of left field. “Are you able to comprehend what in the hell is going on with your life right now? Do you get what a fucking mess we’re in?”
“What’s that got to do with Hank?”
She was stunned and temporarily speechless. “I am begging you to stop being this stupid.”
He smiled. “There ain’t no ‘s’ in ‘tupid.’”
“Huh?”
“My granddad used to call me ‘stupid’ when I was a little boy. He said he didn’t lose a testicle in the Big War and nearly a leg to give me the freedom to be stupid. But I didn’t hear the word right. So, I said, ‘I ain’t tupid, granddad.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘Well, boy, there ain’t no “s” in �
��tupid.”’
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either. Maybe you’re ‘tupid’ too,” he said with a mischievous grin.
They’d gathered enough asparagus to feed a small family and headed back to the car when Jane turned around.
“We need more food than this.” She looked across at the farm. “Promise me you’ll stay put in the car?”
Harlan nodded and Jane set off across the perimeter of the meadow. It was barely eight o’ clock in the morning but that was prime time for farmers. Jane surreptitiously approached the back acreage of the property and came up on a barbed wire fence. A sign warned her that she was encroaching on the private property of the Kirchner Family Dairy Farm and trespassers weren’t allowed. But Jane Perry never let a little sign slow her down. Wiggling her way between the barbed wire, she managed to just make it through without getting hooked. But she didn’t allow for the sloppy soil beneath her feet. When the sole of her cowboy boots hit a pocket of mud, Jane hit the muck hard. “Fuck me!” she whispered in defiance. Caked with dripping mud, Jane struggled to extract her body from the mess. But just as she was about to get up, she heard the sound of a man’s voice in the distance.
“Sarah!” he yelled, angrily.
Jane hunkered down in the mud and low-lying grass. There was a large barn about fifty yards away, which Jane had to assume was the milking area. A tall, heavy-set man wearing a plaid flannel shirt and overalls led two cows toward the old structure.
“Sarah!” the man screamed again, with added frustration.
“I’m coming!”
Jane watched as a little brown haired girl about eight years old ran through the field toward the barn, carrying a baby goat. Almost simultaneously, Jane felt an insect work its way up the inside of her right pant leg. “Jesus!” she whispered, standing up quickly.
In that second, the little girl turned and stopped in her tracks, staring at Jane across the grassy field. Jane ducked back down but she knew the kid had already spotted her.
“Sarah!” her father yelled again. “Stop screwing around and get in here!”
Jane carefully looked up again from her crouched position. The child continued toward the barn but seemed more entranced with Jane than concerned. There were two options here, Jane factored. One was to continue to the barn and see what food she could grab and the other was to return empty handed to the Mustang. With her churning, hungry gut, the choice was obvious. By the time she reached the rear of the two-story wooden building, she could easily hear the loud scolding Sarah’s father was delivering to his daughter.
“When I tell you to come here, I don’t mean in five minutes!” he berated her. “I mean immediately! You understand?”
Jane carefully moved around the structure toward an open window.
“I don’t want to hear any excuses out of your mouth, Sarah! We’ve got the Farmer’s Market tomorrow. You know your responsibilities and I’m sick and tired of having to remind you! Is that clear? You understand me?”
Jane couldn’t hear the kid’s response but it didn’t matter. Her triggers were igniting. “You understand me?” may have been three simple words to anyone else, but to Jane they sent her backward twenty-three years and into that chaotic household. That impulsive urge to strike out and attack the oppressor was there but the situation didn’t allow for it.
“Smarten up, Sarah! Nobody in this world is going to give you anything! There are no free lunches! Remember that! You understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” the child said, in a strong voice.
“Do your job!” With that, the man irately walked out of the barn and headed across the field.
Jane stood motionless for several minutes. She didn’t hear anything inside the barn and so she craned her neck and glanced into the window. The kid was gone.
“Hi.”
Jane spun around. “Fuck!”
Sarah stood behind Jane with a soft smile. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The awkwardness of the moment was only outdone by Jane’s desperation. “I’m not gonna hurt you, okay?”
“I know you’re not,” the girl replied softly as she petted the goat’s head.
Somehow the kid knew Jane was okay, although Jane had no clue how this child figured that out so quickly. “You got some milk and eggs in there?”
“Uh-huh,” the girl nodded.
“Can I get some?”
The child checked around the corner. “Can you move fast?”
“Fast enough, kid.”
Jane followed Sarah into the barn. On one side were the two cows in their milking stalls. Above them was a hayloft and to the side a long table with a red and white plastic tablecloth that appeared to be used for selling the farm’s produce. Beyond that was a clothesline filled with shirts, a couple pair of overalls, canvas pants and towels.
“We keep all of it in there,” Sarah said, pointing to an old refrigerator. She crossed to the large doors of the barn and acted as a lookout.
Jane checked the items. Shelves of milk, cheese, yogurt, keifer and eggs filled the space. She snatched up one gallon of milk, three blocks of cheese, two-dozen eggs and a quart of yogurt. Sarah handed her a burlap sack to carry it. Sitting on a table next to the refrigerator were vacuum-sealed bags of homemade jerky. Jane quickly swept up six packages. Once it was all secured in the sack, she reached into her wallet and handed the kid a hundred-dollar bill.
“That should cover it,” Jane stated.
“Just take it.” She gently set the baby goat down on the barn floor.
Jane shook her head. “Like your dad said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The girl stood there perplexed. Jane knew she had to beat feet out of there quickly. “What do you like to do in your spare time?”
“Read.”
Jane shoved the hundred-dollar bill in the kid’s pocket. “That’ll buy you a few books. Tell your dad you found it on the road.” She started to turn. “Or don’t tell him,” she said with a knowing glance.
“Tell him what?” the girl replied, wise beyond her years.
Jane looked at the clothing hanging on the line. “What size is that shirt and overalls?”
Back at the car, Harlan and Jane dove into the farm fresh food with gusto. Harlan was thrilled to have his raw eggs again and slammed six into his mouth before Jane even had the cheese unwrapped. As a dedicated omnivore, Jane knew she couldn’t exist on just dairy alone so she plopped three raw eggs into a stainless steel coffee travel mug, added enough milk to dilute the yolks and swallowed it. To her shock, the concoction didn’t make her gag. And it seemed to work because she began to gather more energy. She pulled out the flannel shirt and overalls she stole off the line and handed them to Harlan.
“You need to get out of those clothes. They look ridiculous and they smell.”
“Yeah, and puttin’ a flannel shirt and overalls on a fat guy makes him look even better,” he sarcastically replied.
It was the first adroit comment Jane had heard from Harlan’s mouth and she couldn’t help but smile at his self-deprecating humor.
“What kind of trouble are we gonna get into today, Jane?” Harlan asked, powering through the carton of eggs.
She stared out into the fields that dotted the bucolic scenery. There was a sense of something close by—of family and home. But there was also a feeling of regret and unhappiness.
“What is it, Jane?”
“I feel that sadness too.” She turned to the dairy farm and wondered if she was still hooked into that child’s drama. But she wasn’t. The melancholy came from another place. It was tinged with loneliness and buffered by years of disappointment.
“We ain’t that far from the New Mexico border. Maybe we should get out of Colorado and head south? You still got to see your sister—”
“Half-sister,” she corrected with an edge to her voic
e. “And I don’t have to see her.”
“Sure you do. Just like you’re gonna have to call Hank,” he replied, chugging a cup of milk and wiping off his face with the back of his fleshy hand.
Jane pulled up the memory of the night before. “Where’s your notebook?”
He found it and handed it to Jane. Turning the pages, she scanned them quickly.
“What is it, Jane?”
“Just looking for something…” It was a stretch but she hoped it was in there. And it was, dead center, in the heart of the notebook: IEB. “Does that mean anything to you?” she asked him, pointing out the three letters.
“Nope.”
Jane checked to see if her computer had any Internet coverage but she was out of range. “International…Environmental…Bureau?” She mused, taking a wild stab. “Investigative Election Board…”
“I Eat Bacon?” Harlan offered. “I Enjoyed Beer?”
Jane shot him a tired look. She needed to let her mind percolate a little longer on what IEB might stand for.
“Anything else in the bag?” Harlan asked, pointing to the burlap sack.
Jane was still deep in thought as she handed him the sack.
“Oh, shit…” Harlan murmured.
“What?” Jane asked, quickly coming out of her deliberation.
Harlan handed her an eight by ten color flyer. “This was folded at the bottom of the sack.”
It was a flyer from the Las Animas County Sheriff’s Office from the previous year, promoting the appointment of Undersheriff Joe Russo. Surrounding his smiling face were four cheesy color photos that were supposed to represent his professional interests. “Schools,” “Community,” “Family” and “Neighbors” framed Russo’s mug. Harlan stabbed his first finger on the photo of a house in the “Neighbors’” shot.
“It’s the blue picket fence, Jane.”
“Holy shit.” She eyed it closer.
“Did you see it too last night?”
“Yeah.” It looked identical to what she saw in the vision. But Las Animas County was pushing one hundred miles east of where they were at that moment. Why in the hell this flyer was found at the bottom of a burlap sack in a dairy barn she just happened upon wasn’t the biggest question Jane had. Her main quandary was how they were going to get to where they needed to be without tipping off a cadre of law enforcement. Checking a beat up map she found nearly glued under the driver’s seat, Jane factored it would take about two hours to get to Trinidad, the county seat of Las Animas, if they took major roads and the highway. Opting for the most remote mountain back roads, she figured they would easily tag another ninety minutes onto the trip. After ducking behind a grove of trees to change into another pair of jeans, Jane secured the food in the cooler. With Harlan satiated in the backseat and snoozing under a heap of blankets, Jane turned the Mustang around and headed east.
