Bent Road (4 page)

“Anyone see that fellow around here?” Daniel asks. “Any of you see him?”

“Got one,” shouts a different boy as he walks out of a shed a few yards beyond the barn. This one, who is five, maybe six years old, has a kitten cupped in his hands. He walks over to the hole that the boys were digging when Daniel first walked up.

“You got to watch this,” one of the brothers says, ignoring Daniel’s question.

The boy who was sitting near the barn has almost reached them. Up close, his head seems too large for his body, as if his neck can’t quite hold it up, and both legs bow to the right. He has the same dark hair but his is cut high off his forehead.

“Come on,” the crippled boy says. “These guys are stupid.”

The youngest boy is still fussing with the hole and the kitten, patting down the dirt like he is planting a tomato. An older brother walks toward the hole with a weed whip.

Following the boy across the drive, Daniel tucks Evie under one arm and presses her face into his side, holding tight so she can’t squirm away. The boy walks with an awkward rhythm—step, step, pause, step, step, pause—as if he has to think about each set of steps before he takes them. Reaching Dad’s truck, the crippled boy throws open the passenger side door and Daniel shoves Evie inside.

Up on the porch, Dad walks out of the house, followed by a large man who must be Mr. Bucher, although he seems too big to have a son as small and broken as this boy. The two men shake hands and Dad walks down the steps, his hat tucked under his arm.

“Thanks,” Daniel says to the boy and climbs in after Evie. “See you around?”

The boy nods and limps toward the house. “Lock your windows,” he says. “Doors, too. Just in case.”

From over near the barn, someone calls out, “Fore.”

 

R
ay must feel it, too, Ruth thinks as they pull away from Arthur’s new house. Jonathon has taken Mother home and Arthur and his family are settled in their new house. They have full stomachs, freshly made beds, and fans are perched in every bedroom window. She worried that when Arthur came home, he would look at her like all of the others in town. She worried that he, like everyone else, had always wondered if Ruth married the man who killed her own sister. Ruth swallows, blinks away the feeling that she’s betraying Eve, thinking ill of the dead. But Arthur didn’t look at her like the rest of them. He looked at her like they were young again, before anything bad happened. Before Eve died. He looked at her like he still loved her.

Rolling down her window, Ruth inhales the smell of cut feed and freshly plowed sod. Nearing the top of the hill that separates her and Ray’s house from Arthur’s new home, the landscape even seems prettier. The gently rolling hills, the dark fields, the brome-lined ditches. Ray must see it, too. He seemed happier today. He stopped with one glass of whiskey at Mother’s. His eyes never drooped. His speech never slurred. At Arthur’s new house, just half a mile from Ruth and Ray’s home, Ray had worked hard, unpacking and piecing together the bed frames, hauling boxes in from the truck, unwrapping dishes and silverware. And as they began the short ride home, he drove with his hat pushed high on his head and one arm draped around Ruth’s shoulders. He had seemed content with Ruth, as happy as he had been in their earliest days together. Never as happy as he had been with Eve. But almost happy.

Once they are over the top of the hill, Ruth sees their house down below. As new and different as the landscape looks and the air smells, their house is the same. By the time they reach the bottom of the hill, the happiness is gone. It’s a subtle change, like a shifting shadow. Arthur is home again and he still loves Ruth, but no one else is coming with him. He is a reminder of happier times but also of all that has been lost. And Evie, too. Ruth had wondered if Ray would notice the resemblance. When Evie first walked out of Mother’s house, skipping across the gravel drive, cheeks flushed with heat, braids swinging behind, bangs brushing her forehead, Ray had blinked and cleared his throat into a closed fist as he looked down on her. Then the memory was gone, or Ruth thought it was. Now, as she and Ray sit in front of their house, the truck idling beneath them, she realizes they have not come home to the same place they have lived for twenty years. They have come home to a worse place, a lonelier place, and Ruth is more afraid of Ray than ever.

Walking down St. Anthony’s stone steps for the first time, Celia pins her pillbox hat to her head with one white-gloved hand. In Detroit, all of the ladies wore gloves to church. Here, the women have bare hands and dirty nails. Midway down the stairs that widen as they near street level, Celia stops, the other parishioners filtering around her, and plucks a few cockleburs from the hem of her blue cotton skirt. She frowns at the brown oval smudges that stain each fingertip of her white Sunday gloves. Perhaps the reason none of the women wear them. Having lost Arthur in the crowd that filed out of the church following the end of service, she lets the flow of the other churchgoers lead her. All around, people talk in whispers even though church is over.

“Didn’t you hear?” one woman asks another.

“Such terrible news,” says a third. “Simply terrible.”

Tugging off her stained gloves one finger at a time, Celia scans the crowd until she finds Ruth standing near the bottom of the stairs where everyone seems to be gathering. Her perfectly formed oval face wrapped in a blue and yellow print scarf is tilted up, smiling.

While fending off houseflies with her church bulletin, Celia had spent her first Kansas sermon looking from one hometown parishioner to the next, noticing, as they shifted about on the pews and swatted at flies, that they all had the same overgrown ears and fleshy noses. There were a few, probably in-laws like herself, and the priest, Father Flannery, who hadn’t inherited the trait. And as she studied them, she felt them studying her. Her navy blue skirt was too proper with its sharp pleats and tailored waistband. The other women wore skirts that ballooned over their large hips. They wore floral scarves, not gossamer trimmed hats. Theirs were white cotton blouses, wrinkled and nearly gray. Hers was a silk print, hand washed and dried flat on a towel. By the end of the service, Celia even looked at Arthur, crossing and uncrossing her legs so she could turn unnoticed to study the size and shape of his ears and nose, but he looked like an outsider, and Ruth, too, with her delicate brow and graceful neck. Reesa, however, could have birthed the entire congregation.

“Good morning,” Ruth says, clasping her hands together and stepping back when Celia reaches the bottom stair. Her eyelashes cast a feathery shadow on her cheeks and the silver and gray in her hair shimmers in the sunlight. “Lovely service.”

“Yes,” Celia says. “A little warm though,” and she shields her eyes. No sign of Arthur, though she does spot Reesa standing with the three women who were whispering about the terrible news. She is shaking her head as the women talk. Feeling that she has spent the better part of her short time in Kansas swatting bugs, swallowing dust and searching for Arthur, Celia drops her hand and stops looking.

Ruth smiles with closed lips. “There he is,” she says, pointing up at Arthur, who is standing at the top of the stairs among a group of men wearing short-sleeve dress shirts and thick black belts.

Celia nods and gives a small wave when Arthur motions in her direction as if to point out his wife to his old friends. Elaine stands nearby at Jonathon’s side, both of them talking with the other young men who must, like Jonathon, work in the oil fields. Weeks of moaning and complaining and already Elaine is at home. Ray, who is also standing with Jonathon, seems to return Celia’s wave, which was meant for Elaine, but because of the way his left eye drifts off to the side, she’s not quite sure where he’s looking. She frowns anyway and after the group of men, all of whom have large ears and noses, turns away, she asks, “Is this where everyone meets?”

“Yes,” Ruth says. “The sheriff will talk from up there.” She motions toward the church’s double doors at the top of the stone staircase. “Except if it’s wintertime. Then we all gather in the church basement.”

“Does he come every Sunday?”

“No. Only when he has business, news to tell.”

Celia pulls the gold pins from her pillbox hat, drops them into her change pouch and tucks the hat under one arm. “News of what?”

Ruth lowers her head and glances over her shoulder in a way that Celia has come to recognize as common.

“A girl,” she says. “A local girl’s gone missing.”

Behind them, a car pulls up to the curb and parks. The congregation quiets as a small, narrow-shouldered man steps out of a black and white police car. He wears a dark blue uniform and a beige tie that has pulled loose at the knot and hangs crooked around his open collar. Passing them by, he tips his hat, seemingly at Ruth, and shakes a few hands as he makes his way to the top of the stairs, where he waits silently, hands on hips. The churchgoers gathering on the sidewalk push Celia and Ruth to the back.

“Some of you folks will already be knowing this,” the sheriff says, clearing his throat into a closed fist. The six-pointed silver star pinned to his shirt sparkles in the sunlight. “But I’ll tell you all now. Little Julianne Robison has turned up missing.” He pauses again. “Her folks called us in last evening. Now, chances are the child has just wandered off. Lost her way in the fields or maybe down by the river. Out playing is all she was doing.”

Shielding her eyes with one hand and holding her hair with the other, Celia steps away from the crowd so she can see Daniel and Evie. They both stand where last she saw them—in the steeple’s shadow this side of the whitewashed fence that wraps around the church’s small cemetery. Evie is bent down near the fence, picking the downy-like seeds from a dandelion. Daniel, standing with both hands shoved in his front pockets, watches the sheriff.

“I’ll need for any of you kids to talk with me if you’ve seen our Julianne of late,” the sheriff says. “Some of us men have already been out looking but I’d like the rest of you gentlemen to join us in a search. We’ll start our looking in town and work our way out. Orville and Mary say the girl’s prone to going off alone. A hungry stomach’ll probably bring her home, but the more of you can help, the quicker we’ll all get home to Sunday supper.”

T
aking a step backward because the shade from the steeple keeps falling away from him, Daniel sees the crippled boy leaning on the bumper of a truck parked across the street, rubbing his thighs with the palm of each hand. Waiting until the boy glances his way, Daniel gives a wave. The boy waves back, pushes himself off the bumper and walks across the street. Step, step, pause. Step, step, pause, until he reaches the tip of the shade where Daniel stands.

“Hey,” the boy says, crossing his arms and leaning against the white wooden fence that separates them from the cemetery.

“Hey.”

“Name’s Ian.”

“I’m Daniel. This is Evie.”

Evie blows a tuft of dandelion feathers at Ian.

“What do you think?” Ian asks, nodding at the sheriff still standing near the church doors.

“Didn’t know her.”

“She’s younger.” He dips his head toward Evie. “More about her age.”

“Sounds like she’ll be home by dinner,” Daniel says, watching all the Bucher brothers meet up at the truck Ian had been leaning against. Like the red ants in Mama’s kitchen, they keep coming, one after another.

“Like hell,” Ian says, shuffling closer. “I know what happened. I know exactly what happened.” He pauses and looks around like he’s afraid someone might hear. “After Jack Mayer escaped from Clark City, he snatched her right up. That’s what happened.”

Daniel crosses his arms over his chest. “Think I might have seen that Jack Mayer,” he says. “The night we got here. Pretty sure I saw him.”

“At your place?” Ian says, shifting his weight from his short leg to his long one. “You catch him stealing food?”

Daniel shakes his head. “Back that way. On the drive in. Saw him running across the road. Car might have hit him. Can’t be sure. He must have been black as midnight because I could barely see him. Just like you said.”

“It was a tumbleweed,” Evie says, peeling apart a dandelion stem and draping the thin pieces across her bare knee.

Daniel nudges her with his foot. “Wasn’t a tumbleweed.”

“Over on Bent Road?” Ian asks. “Where the road takes a hard turn? That where you saw him?”

Daniel nods.

“Could have happened. That’s the only spot that still has water this time of year. Everything else has dried up. That’s where a fellow’d have to head.” Ian looks up at Daniel and smiles. “Yeah, could have happened just that way.”

“Sure, I guess.”

All night, Daniel had lain awake, imagining the whites of Jack Mayer’s eyes shining outside his bedroom window, which he had locked and checked twice. Probably chains hung from both wrists and he did all his traveling at night because his coal-black skin hid him in the darkness. Jack Mayer is a big man, that’s for sure. Even in the dark, at the top of Bent Road, Daniel could judge the man’s size. Hearing a rattle inside Ian’s chest, Daniel takes a step backward.