“You got security guards, huh?”
“Something like that.”
He cleared his throat. “Jesus. They look like they’re packing.” Looking at me he said, “Guns I mean, you know?”
As I shrugged I felt someone poke into my shoulder.
“Lucy. Don’t forget.”
Kitty held my backpack out to me. I was so stunned by the mass of activity I would’ve walked right off the bus without it.
I thanked her and hooked a strap over my shoulder. Appraised the unholy mass of people. The deputy had his hands up, doing his best to keep the crowd out of the road and away from the bus.
“You ready?” Pat asked.
“Not really.”
“Just don’t stop moving,” he said. “Even if you get locked into place and it seems like you can’t move right then, that moment, keep moving on your heels at least, you know, bouncing.” He actually bounced back and forth in his seated position. “Soon as you get an actual opening,” he clapped his hands, “just go like a shot.”
I nodded. He wrenched on the handle and the doors opened.
“Bye.” Waving, Kitty looked like she was witnessing a departure that would meet an assuredly sad end.
Both Mom and Maddy shared the Engler genes. They were small and bird-boned. I was McCall all the way through. Tall and big-boned. My size gave me confidence when physical activity was the call of the day, but right then, I could make do with being small and bird-boned. Actually just being the size of a bird, winged like a bird, would’ve been preferable, darting through and away from all the strangers.
Coming around the front of the bus I heard what seemed like a hundred strangers calling for my attention. The sun glinted off the windows of news vans, and the white glimmer off of sunglasses in the crowd made me think of people crowded together in a bright desert, beholding some super-shiny partially uncovered UFO long buried in the earth.
I kept moving towards the driveway. I didn’t want to sprint, not with cameras recording. Part of me hobbled that need, not wanting to look scared, not wanting to look like the stuck-up celebrity by default of having a celebrity in the family. But oh, did I want to sprint.
A scream ripped through the air.
A man had bolted from the crowd, the deputy reaching for him, but it was too late.
The man had wiry black hair, glasses, and his hands were stuck straight out in front of him. A spiral bound notebook was clutched in his right hand.
His legs did a funny kick step thing like his legs were partially restrained by leg braces.
I slowed down. I couldn’t help it.
The man muttered to himself. The tongues of sticky notes stuck up off the notebook pages. He was an Elliot. Like Mom called that class of healthy blondes Betty’s and cute short brunettes Betsy’s, nerds were all Elliot’s. Skinny or overweight, male or female, tall, short, whatever, an Elliot was pretty easy to pick out. Mom knew them pretty well, being a self-confessed Elliot herself.
This one had a red face and looked incensed like I’d broken a promise or his heart and every transgression was noted in the blue Mead notebook, the especially egregious examples marked by a sticky note. There were a lot of sticky notes.
For a moment it seemed I’d be face to face with him and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
One second, Dina wasn’t there, and then she was.
She didn’t tackle him or punch or throw herself into him. She snapped into place like one of those full-sized criminal or civilian targets cops use on the practice range.
She talked to him. Anytime he looked around her towards me, she dipped her head in response, cutting off his view of me. He wanted to look, he could look, but all he got to look at was her face.
I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Only the Elliot could. He seemed to be calming down when he rolled his head back and shouted to the sky, “Oh come on!” Some horrible sound like an emptying garbage disposal issued from his throat and then he chuckled. She held something out to him. A small Lucentology blue colored card like a business card. He took it from her.
Dina looked over her shoulder, at the bus, and nodded her head to the right, toward the north side of Jennings, not quite touching the man, but her hand getting awful close to him, close enough that he followed the body language and moved with her, allowing the bus to keep on with the last delivery of the day.
By the time the bus disappeared on the horizon the Elliot had merged back into the ranks of the crowd. He was famous all of a sudden. Encircled by the news crews. He held the notebook aloft. At first I thought he was making pronouncements, but then it looked like the news crews just wanted a good shot of the notebook for any sort of story that got filed.
Dina walked towards the driveway. Later on I’d see why the reporters didn’t pester her for a word about what had just taken place.
The news footage, depending on which you chose to see – there were a couple different angles - showed the Elliot (actually named Wilson Plass) closing on me. Dina didn’t run to intercept him. She hadn’t had to. Just as soon as it was obvious the deputy wasn’t going to be able to rope Plass in, Dina started moving. It looked cool and efficient and like some robot programmed to move, programmed to predict other’s behavior.
“Thank you,” I said. Dina nodded. “What was that you gave him?”
“My business card. I told him if he wanted to he could give us his…document. And if that wasn’t doable, I told him if he wanted he could send me a photocopy of his…work.”
“The notebook?”
“Uh huh.”
“What’s in it?”
“He said only Maddy or her sister could possibly understand it.”
“I don’t know who he is,” I said. “Does…does Maddy?”
“I think we’d know about him if he’d ever made any kind of contact with your sister,” said Dina.
“Aliens.” Trent’s first word of the day. Maybe his only word for the entire day.
I looked at him. Back at Dina. She nodded.
“It usually is with the…Well. With those kind of guys, it just usually is.”
I walked the rest of the way to the house.
Staring out at the mass of people on Jennings got to me. Problem was, it seemed so long as I was in the house that was all I could do. Stare. Wonder. Play over and over in my head what would’ve happened if Wilson Plass had gotten to me and started going on and on about aliens.
On the brink of another anxiety attack I did something I never thought I’d do.
I pulled a Maddy.
Chapter 11
If you followed the loop - East Jennings transforming into West Jennings - the road would take you to Uncle Bob’s, but the patchwork of properties forced the road to meander quite a bit before arriving at that destination. The other way, much more direct, was to go through our back yard into the fields.
The first hill back of our yard was full of weeds and some desiccated trees. At the base of the hill was a draw cantering southwest. The draw had once been a creek. Where it started to angle north you continued southwest and went up a farmer’s field, growing wheat around this time of year, and then into another patch of unused land, only a slight rise, treeless and barren but for tan grass and rock. Over that and through another field of grain, mostly on a down slope, you’d hit Jennings again and Uncle Bob’s place just to the west a half mile.
Turning south on West Jennings right there, you’d eventually pass the Winks place, the property Dad had renters moving into by the end of the week.
When Maddy was in high school, there were a couple occasions where she went all covert either getting to our house or getting out of the house.
One time it involved her friend Caitlyn who’d asked Maddy to please come with her to the Planned Parenthood in Ashmond, after which several tedious return episodes including a minor car acciden
t left Maddy getting home way later than she’d anticipated.
Several other times it involved heading out late to meet a boy or friends who had come into possession of beer.
Each of those times she used the shortcut to avoid coming home in the obvious way, which would likely include a sit down face to face with either Mom or Dad.
If her bedroom window were left propped open, you could hop up on the back patio railing, scamper up the inclined roof over the laundry room, and one heft of body weight up the eaves and a scamper up the main roof later, you were practically in the house.
Or out of it.
I could go out the back door, but something was curled in my consciousness, a niggling insistent worm, compelling me to do it the old fashioned Maddy-way. For the longest time I stood in Maddy’s room, her window open, trying to summon the courage to slip out on the roof and down to the porch. Maddy was lithe and quick. I wasn’t uncoordinated, but I kept imagining shingles slipping out of place beneath my body weight.
Eventually the temptation, the temporary madness, dissipated and I just left the house by the back door. Much more sensible. Dad would have a fit if he came home and found me out back, twisted and broken for trying the oddest of physical feats.
Halfway to Uncle Bob’s I realized I didn’t have my phone. I hadn’t called Dad, warning him what to expect when he tried to get home. I’d just call him once I got to the farm.
Having Dina and Trent parked in front of Ruth’s car confused me. Did they show up at the same time? Did they know it was Ruth’s car? Did Dad know they were essentially blocking the entrance to our house?
Dina hadn’t saved my life, but she’d definitely come up big in that moment. Everyone else seemed frozen in place. The little conspiracy theory node in my brain glowed red hot for a moment, trying to convince me Wilson Plass was in the employ of Lucentologists and his ambling towards me had all been staged, something to help make me and Dad think better of Dina and Lucentology. I let the possibility roll around my skull, and once the heat left it, I let it go to dust.
Scuffing dirt on the decline towards the place in the road where Jennings hooked and snaked south, a chill enveloped me, imagining Wilson Plass getting close enough I could see the smears on his lenses, the notebook falling from his hand, revealing a kitchen knife he’d been clutching all the while. The knife the information he needed so desperately to share with Maddy or me. In her absence, the sister would do. The sister would do just fine.
I looked over my shoulder just to still the notion that the heavyset man hadn’t evaded Dina and picked up my trail and was in pursuit.
Mojo ran up to meet me. Mojo wasn’t much of a guard dog. She’d run up to just about anyone, panting, her fluffy white and gray butt wiggling, waiting for pets.
Uncle Bob was a real farmer. Horses, cows, at least one pig and several fields of wheat and barley.
Beside the hay barn was a garage big enough for at least 2 full-size trucks. The beat up red truck Uncle Bob had driven as long as I could remember was parked outside the garage. One of the garage doors was down. Revealed by the rolled up door was another truck, hood up, undergoing surgery inside the garage. A radio played country music. A tool kit sat on a wheeled metal cart in front of the truck’s driver side headlight.
Approaching the place, I’d heard a motor try and try to catch, then kick over and start, and the putt-put of a motor seem steady up to the point it abruptly ceased. Then what sounded like a door slam. Other than the crunch of gravel under my foot, those were the only other sounds out in the countryside. It was doing me good, the sense of solitude, after the festivities of arriving home.
The shadows inside the garage were made darker by the bright sunlight outside. Bob didn’t come into view until he was practically parallel to the front passenger side tire.
He always wore a denim baseball cap and one of a series of button-down western shirts, most bearing grease stains, or a combination of grease and dirt. His face was usually tanned, whiskered, and depending on the time of year, darkened by grime from working on engines. He kept talking about selling the farm and just becoming a mechanic, but he’d been talking like that since I was in 2nd grade.
Uncle Bob squinted at me. He waggled the socket wrench in hand at me and took a step out of the garage onto the gravel.
“What’s going on, Squirt?” His nickname for me persisted, probably would into my adult life.
“Just felt like going for a walk.”
“Right.”
Without his asking me to, I immediately told him what had happened once the bus had dropped me off. I was babbling. I couldn’t stop even though I knew what I was putting him through.
Finally done, Mojo nudged me like she could tell I was still upset, still anxious. I scratched her ears. Uncle Bob looked out towards the mouth of his driveway, methodically brushing the knuckles of his right hand into his chin.
“Yeah,” he said, “I noticed that the bus went by here a little later than it usually does. Thought it just meant that the driver had to pull over and take a whiz or something.”
He cleared his throat and spat to the right.
“He came out here?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“I thought he turned around when he dropped off Kitty.”
Uncle Bob grunted and shrugged. He spit again.
“Pardon me, Luce,“ he wiped his chin. “You all right from all that excitement?”
I nodded. “I think so. It was just a little unexpected.”
He laughed.
“Your dad’s gonna have a fuckin’ fit and a half, pardon my French. I mean not just the crowd, well, mostly the crowd, but you saying them people, the Hollyweird people, are acting like they’re protecting the place?”
“Kind of.”
“Oh, shit on a stick. Senate will lose it. Absolutely lose it. Guaranteed.”
He scuffed a boot toe into the dirt, a smile on his lips, amused at the image of his younger brother.
I said, “I’m just having a real hard time imagining getting Maddy and Jack through that mass of people. Let alone in and out, especially on the day they’re coming to school and all.”
“Put ‘em on the bus.”
I smiled. Imagined how freaked out everyone would be, especially Maddy, the disconnect from her current station in life when thrust up in stark contrast to the small town life she’d endured not all that long ago.
“Helicopter,” said Uncle Bob. “That’d be good. That’d be smart. Airlift ‘em in and out. That’s what I’d do. No muss no fuss.”
“It might come to that.”
He laughed. “That’d be something.” I kept expecting him to make a crack about how they could just employ one of those UFOs all the Lucentologists believed in, but he didn’t.
“You planning on going to the movie premiere?”
He made a face like he’d bitten into a pancake and instead tasted cow flop.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” I said.
“No, and hell no. I hate movie theaters.” His head bobbed forward on ‘hate’. “You know, it's not movies. I like movies. I love Clint Eastwood, you know, but it’s being in the darkness with a bunch of strangers. I just get to feeling cramped and if someone starts coughing and someone else starts blowing their nose and then someone else starts babbling away I just…”
He shook his head back and forth, staring out into the space in front of his eyes, overcome by the sheer awfulness of the very prospect.
“But you’ll see her while she’s here, won’t you?”
He shrugged. “If I do, I do. If I don’t, oh well. She knows what I look like.”
“If you try to see her maybe you ought to just use the shortcut.”
“The what?”
I told him about the Maddy shortcut, how she used it when she was even younger than I was.
“If you keep getting idiots
out in front of your place that might be the only way to get in and out of Fort McCall,” he said.
Mojo had flopped at my feet and was gnashing her teeth at whatever nasty little bugs were digging in under her fluff. Part of her lay on my feet. I could feel her jerk a little each time she renewed the attack. Most of me was far away though, thinking.
“You ok there, Squirt?” asked Uncle Bob. “You look a little confused.”
“No,” I said. “I just thought of something though.” I smiled. “Uncle Bob, how many horses do you have that take to being ridden by strangers?”
Chapter 12
I didn’t talk to Dad, but left a message regarding the mess out in front of the house on his cell. On top of people moving into the Winks place and Maddy’s imminent arrival I didn’t want him to worry where I might be. I threw Mojo’s tennis ball for her until my shoulder started getting sore, and after telling Uncle Bob I’d see him later, I started back home, making sure to get going before dusk potentially masked a gopher hole or some other nasty hazard just waiting to bust my ankle.
Walking into our backyard I could hear the buzz of noise from out front. Tension returned almost like I’d tripped a wire and caused it. I walked around the west side of the house, keeping close to the wall in case I felt a sudden need for retreat.
Beyond the hackberry tree in the front yard I could see the news vehicles and now 2 county sheriff rigs, the new arrival an SUV. The number of people looked smaller, but I couldn’t tell for sure. The deputies might just have them pushed back into a smaller area, or they might be spread out on the field.
I crept up along the edge of the front porch until I could see the driveway and Dina and Trent’s rig and Ruth’s car parked behind it. The angle didn’t allow sight of either one of the security people.
For the sake of my own nerves, I intended on walking the entire house, maybe even going so far as checking cabinets and the washer and dryer, before thinking of home as safe, Wilson Plass-free. I entered the house through the back door and almost the moment the door was shut the kitchen phone started ringing.
Once Maddy became ‘Maddy the Movie Star,’ we’d changed our phone number and kept it unlisted. There were very few people who knew the landline number.