Behind The Curve-The Farm | Book 1 | The Farm

by Craven III, Boyd

  To Rob’s amazement, the bull tilted its head side to side, then took a step closer to her as she started scratching the skin between his eyes and around his ears. Rob had seen Big Red plow through fences, knock over a small steel shed, and he had kicked, or head butted enough people that everyone in the county was afraid of him. His sires were highly sought after, which was the reason why he was never sent to freezer camp. But this little woman had him acting like a big puppy dog.

  “That is where he got out,” Chuck said to himself while Don and Lyle and a couple other ranch hands took their horses around the fence that separated the properties. It looked like Big Red had been rubbing on a tree and a large limb had come down, pushing the fence down. Most cows would not step over that mess of barbed wire, but Big Red had his name for a reason.

  He was big and when he got mad, he saw red and was a pain in the ass; he should have been sent to be processed a long time ago, in Chuck’s opinion.

  With some coaxing, Chuck got his horse across the gap in fencing and stood there, watching the other cows following him.

  “Shoo!” he said, flipping his hat at the approaching heifers.

  They stopped a good distance back. He figured he better radio the breach to the boss and see if he could get Big Red back through the way he came in.

  “Chuck for Lyle, I found where Big Red got loose.”

  “Where’s the breach?” Lyle asked, the signal loud and clear.

  “Near that big old hoary oak, our southeastern fence area.”

  “I know right where you’re at. Do you want me to send one of the boys to you and the rest of us will push Big Red over?”

  “That sounds good to me boss,” Chuck said, getting off his horse and wrapping the reins around part of the branch that had fallen.

  It took an hour, but the group ended up at the breach. Anna used the UTV to help pull the wire tight so they could get it tacked in once again, while Lyle and his men used some fencing pliers, wearing thick cowhide gloves.

  “We got it,” Lyle called, so Anna put the UTV in neutral and then park before shutting it off.

  The wire they were using to tug with the side by side was cut from the fence and then Don unwrapped it from the hook on the back that Anna suspected Dewey had put on for that exact purpose.

  “Ma’am, Rob,” Lyle said, approaching them both once the work was done, taking his hat off and holding it in both hands. “I want to apologize for that one day at the bar. I was pissed and my mouth got in front of my ass a bit. I know better, but my momma said I’m a horse’s ass when it comes to speaking in the moment and figuring it out later. That was one of those moments, I suppose.”

  Rob did not say anything at first, so Anna got off the side by side and walked up to the big rancher and held out her hand, “They say good fences make good neighbors.” They shook hands. “I’m not sure if this means we’re going to be good friends, but I’d like to be good neighbors at least,” she said with a grin. “Besides, I figure both farms are going to be riding a lot of fences when the calves start being born.”

  Lyle chuckled. “Who told you that?”

  Anna pointed at Rob, who shrugged. “It’s true though,” Rob said.

  “You know ma’am,” Lyle said, “I’d like to at least be good neighbors. Maybe someday I can quit being an asshole long enough to make some new friends. Rob, please apologize to Harry and Angel for me, but especially Angel. I was way out of line, and then you folk patched us up after we tried to put a beatdown on ya. I was too stubborn back then to see it but… you called, you helped, and you haven’t once given me the stink eye.”

  “I’ll let Angel and Harry know,” Rob said. “And who knows, someday maybe we can bury the hatchet.”

  “I’d like that,” Lyle said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  They rode off, waving their hats at the curious cows that were gazing hopefully at the hay field, to keep them away from the repair. Anna was just hopping on the UTV when a second one came zooming down the path. She waited until Steven pulled to a halt next to them.

  “Everything ok?” he asked.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Anna told him. “We got Big Red over the break in the fence and was just about to head back.”

  “Your wife is something else,” Rob said, fighting off the shivers.

  “I know it, but why’d you say that?” Steven said.

  “She walked up to one of the biggest and nastiest bulls I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, and had the big fucker eating out of her hand. He followed her around the way Ranger follows Harry. She had like, zero fear.”

  “Good job, babe!” Steven said. “Want a ride back?”

  Rob looked at both of them, neither bothered, neither scared, and shook his head. “Take the dogs for me? I’m going to walk back up and check the fence as I go.”

  “How about I ride with Steven and you take this?” Anna said, starting to get out.

  “Sure,” he said, hoping his hands were not shaking, as bad as his nerves felt.

  Roscoe looked at both side by sides and then ran over and got in the back behind Anna and let out a loud howl like he was about to go on the hunt.

  “You heard him,” Anna told Steven. “Onward!” She pointed with her right hand towards the house.

  “Ranger come,” Rob said as they watched the couple drive off.

  When he was sitting on the seat next to Rob, Rob asked him, “Am I just a scaredy cat, or are those city folks really dumb and fearless?”

  Ranger barked loudly, then gave Rob’s cheek an excited lick.

  “You’re right, it’s time to man up. I do not mind getting shown up by Angel, but when Anna did that… I get to keep my man card, don’t I boy?”

  Ranger barked, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

  “Ok, let’s go ride some fence.”

  Fourteen

  The end of quarantine coincided with the hospital absolutely needing the three doctors back. They went in reluctantly, bringing their own PPE, keeping it stashed in their inch bags they kept in the hospital, in their offices. They had been scheduled another four days on, three days off, but everybody they saw at the hospital looked ready to drop. Unless they were exposed to somebody sick, they had been working nonstop. Long shifts, with no days off.

  Dante and Leah especially were feeling exhausted after the first long full day back. The new antibody tests were not 100%, but they were right about 75% of the time and when they had two in a row come back negative for the Wuhan Flu, they were sent back to work. Dante had sort of gone crazy once a lot of his stock assets were sold off and put in a cash account. eBay and PayPal loved him almost as much as his bank hated him.

  The office that had been going out of business had private messaged Dante when they saw him bidding on a lot of their things and offered him the whole lot at a discount. He jumped on the offer with the stipulation that they would load and ship it. They agreed, and for less than what many people pay for a new truck, Dante had enough medical equipment that he could have set up two more of the mini doctor offices they’d built on the farm. They had the basement to store extras, but he had to warn Curt first. He remembered they had a cube van with a 12’ bed in the equipment barn. They could start moving things the thirty-minute drive from his office to the farm with that if it had plates and insurance.

  “Doc, you’re needed in room 302,” his head nurse told him.

  “Time to make the chimi-fucking-changas,” Dante said, quoting his favorite anti-hero.

  “You’re sure you can get me that shipment?” Andrea asked, holding the phone between her ear and her shoulder. “Sure, but have they shut down travel from there yet? What about shipping? Oh really? Goodie! Can you get me four, no, six cases worth sent to the same address near Boonville? Yeah, hey, put that on something hot. Next day air. No? Use my card on file. Thanks, but what do you think timing wise? Three weeks? What if I paid for expedited shipping if we can’t get next day air? Oh yeah, that will work out better. Yeah, somebody wil
l be there to unload if it has to go to an LTL shipper. Yeah, just get it here by the end of the month and I will move the calendar to make sure it works. Ok, Bubye.”

  She hung up the phone, almost panting in excitement. One of the contacts she had made in med school was a young woman who had been thinking of immigrating permanently from India after seeing the USA for herself. Instead, she had ended up going home and set up her own clinic. It was not easy being a Christian in India, but the doc had managed it, along with her own pharmacy and medical supply. It was not quite black-market goods, but the made in stamp was empty from the factories she was buying direct from. In the last week, she had sent in orders to her friend that cost her a few thousand dollars. A lot of money in the USA, but a fortune in the village her friend lived in.

  Curt was both elated and annoyed at the same time. He would drive the cube van into town and park at the back and load it up and unload it when he got home. He knew Steven and Anna were doing insane amounts of work, but he wanted to offload more of the old furniture that was in his office. He was tempted to call somebody like American Pickers to see if they wanted to come and bid on things until Anna came in with an empty trailer.

  “I know you’ve been doing a ton of stuff, I just wanted to come see what you have here that we want for the cabins.”

  Curt thought about that for a moment and then grinned. They loaded a couple of dining room sets and a couple of dressers on her trailer before she left. He was killing time, waiting for one of Dante’s big orders to be delivered. All of the empty space in the back was filled when the semi left. He sighed, knowing they needed it.

  What truly bugged him was, as much as they were outfitting the farm, he felt a growing sense of panic. Andrea had not had a day off in a while and the market was crashing. Summer was almost here, and they had all spent time traveling to and from the farm, but any time now they would be under another mandatory lockdown. Real estate as a whole had seemed to stall out in the past week. Many of his clients near his offices in both Boonville and the West Memphis area were now waiting, as many people were getting scared.

  Curt felt like there was a big clock somewhere counting down and here he was sitting on his ass now that the cube van was loaded.

  “I guess it’s good to be the boss,” he said, and turned the open sign over to closed. The note on it had been hand drawn.

  Meeting with clients if closed during business hours. Call 555-931-5555

  Steven was happy. He had been working like a dog, going back and forth between job sites, but the farm’s new buildings were now built, and wiring, electrical and plumbing were all done. The fourth cabin was sitting bare. They had agreed on having a spare place set up just in case they lost one of the cabins in a freak accident and the price they got them at was almost obscene. The projects had come in under budget by a lot. Even with the upgraded septic system, the renovations at the farm came in just under $250,000, with the six of them splitting things evenly. That was not counting the buying sprees on supplies, but for three couples who were well-to-do, they saw it as an ARC for the coming storm. The pandemic had a lot of people scared, but the economy’s recovery ahead of the election was up in the air. He almost felt like folks were spending money now because they did not think it was going to be worth anything in the future.

  The section of the basement that Anna claimed was filling up with the equipment she had not found the room for in their house. She had three Dillon XL-650s with the Mark 7 autodrives mounted and she was working on dialing them in. The first one was setup to handle just 5.56 and .223, the second was set for 9mm and the third was currently set at .45, but she had the dies and materials to load just about anything. Not a lot for her, but she thought she had quite a bit of ammo stored, more so than the rest of each of the group's individuals.

  She had grinned at Angelica’s confused face when the big crates were delivered to the metal building that was set over the slab to the south of the cabins. She had watched materials come in and did not see it come back out, but the building remained mostly empty with the roll up door in the back closed most of the time. She heard hydraulics one day when she was looking for Rob and Steven but found Anna instead.

  “Holy crap, that’s a lot of ammo cans,” she said, making Anna turn and blush.

  “Just getting things put up,” she said, smiling. Anna knew Rob, Harry and Angel had not been in the basement since they had finished the cabins and started moving things in.

  Angelica looked behind her. “Do you know where my son is?”

  “Steven and Rob took him over to ride fences. I think they took a chainsaw to finish cutting up the branch that came down.”

  “Ok, good, I was just wondering… little boys, you know.”

  “I hope to someday,” Anna said. “Want to ride the lift down with me?”

  “Sure!” Angelica told her, excited.

  The stack of ammo cans was only three high on the pallet but adding the two smaller women to the weight on the lift did not make the hydraulics whine any more than normal. When it got to the bottom, Anna hit the stop button. They got off the pallet and when Anna moved it off the lift with a pallet jack, she sent it back up. The basement was so large Anna sucked in a surprised breath. If she had to guess, it was almost ten thousand square feet. Some of it had been walled off to make individual rooms, but most of it was still open.

  LED shop lights cast a harsh white illumination in most of the basement. Angelica could smell paint and was taking in the sights as she followed Anna to a section that seemed to be the brightest in the whole structure. Three reloading presses were set up with room to walk all the way around them. Two small step stools were sitting off to the side. Behind it, arranged on the wall, was a solid workbench with almost two-inch-thick planks making the surface. It was stacked with supplies.

  Underneath the bench was what looked like a round cement mixing drum, but Angelica knew a little bit about reloading and figured it was a tumbler for brass. The rest of the space below the bench was filled with ammo cans waiting to be filled.

  “Holy shit,” Angelica said, “you’re practically an ammunition factory.”

  “I mean, each of these babies can do 900-1200 rounds an hour… if I didn’t have to reload all the materials. Getting all the primers set can be a PITA.”

  “I’m glad you’re happily married to Steven,” Angelica said, pulling out a set of dies, then replacing it, not watching Anna smirk.

  “Why, does Rob love to reload?”

  “Love doesn’t have much to do with it when we could never really afford things,” she said, suddenly a sadness tinging her voice.

  “I know how that goes,” Anna said wrapping her arms around Angelica and giving her a hug. “But you’re part of our family group now.”

  “You don’t know how much this means to us,” Angelica said, her voice hitching. “We’ve been working with you for what, six to eight weeks now? Without having to pay housing and the big raise Rob makes compared to what he used to… we can afford things. Like, I don’t have to worry if I overslept and had to skip cutting coupons before going to the grocery store.” She wiped her red face and then turned back to Anna. “Do you think you can teach me how to reload? Maybe shoot better?”

  “Sure,” Anna said, “and will you teach me how to fight?”

  Angelica stepped back, looking at Anna funny. “You don’t know how to fight? You’re one of the most feared female shooters in the southwest.”

  “Who just recently learned what a monkey stomping is, and honestly, I’ve never been in a fight in my life.”

  Angelica laughed, hiccuped, sobbed, then laughed again. “Deal. Can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure,” Anna told her, smiling.

  “Are you and Steven trying to have a baby?” Her words were so quiet Anna almost did not hear them. “It’s just, I overheard Rob and Steven and I didn’t want to be nosy in case I heard wrong…”

  “We all are,” Anna told her. “For the last year, the thre
e couples that made up our early group have been trying.”

  “Even with the pandemic and the stress with a new farm, construction, moving and…”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “I didn’t think I wanted kids myself for a long time, but Steven did. We didn’t try to stop it from happening and it never did… but now we’re trying.”

  “Oh God, I didn’t mean for this to get too personal,” Angelica said.

  “Don’t worry about it.” She hugged Angelica again. “Want to head to the cabin and get some lunch with me?”

  “Sure,” Angelica said, turning towards the lift.

  “No, this way,” Anna said, taking her across the room to the staircase that led to their cabin.

  Fifteen

  As crazy as the spring and early summer was, mid-summer seemed to put a damper on the cases of the Wuhan Flu. Less and less people were being infected, and the shutdowns seemed to be working to slow and eventually stop the spread of the virus.

  The other thing that slowed and stopped was real estate. Curt fumed. If he had not bought the building outright in Boonville, half an hour from the farm, he would close the business as a failure, a total failure. Once and sometimes twice a week he would make the drive to his West Memphis office, but mostly so he had a good excuse to move supplies from what used to be an overstuffed home back to the farm.

  On the other hand, Andrea had a long stretch of time off. Her schedule had two three-day breaks run together. Dante and Leah were not as lucky. Andrea notified the hospital that they were going on a vacation at their retirement property and would be many hours away in case there were staffing issues. The hospital had been fine with that as the worst of the pandemic crush seemed to be over, and supplies were trickling in at a pace they had not seen in a month. There seemed to be some hope.