Bleeding Kansas (38 page)

“Hi, Elaine,” Gina said. “I am an ickyologist; I dabble in icky stuff. Thanks for finding Jim for me.”

“He was mean to me. He bounced me in the cart and hurt my poor little tushie.”

Jim thought he could see which boards he could pull clear without bringing more of the house down onto the place where Gina was lying. He unhooked the cart from the tractor, backed up close to the house, and attached his chains to several pieces of board. He drove forward just far enough to put a small amount of tension on the chains, and then jumped down to check that he was moving the right pieces. The wood had softened and rotted with time; the piece of siding he'd attached his chains to broke up as he was moving away instead of pulling the front with it.

“It's going to take longer than I thought,” he called to Gina. “This wood's too rotten for easy handling. Anything fall in on you?”

“Just more rotting things. I don't want to imagine what they are; it's hard enough to lie here without screaming from claustrophobia. I'm going to look like a chimney sweep by the time you find me.”

“That's okay. I look like a prairie dog, from grubbing in the ground.”

He unwound the chains from the rotted boards and tried to find a sturdier place to attach them. Again only a small amount of wood held as he pulled away from the bunkhouse. He had to repeat the process half a dozen times before he cleared enough of the front to take a shot at the back room where Gina was pinned. At that point, he took his shovel and started digging away thirty years' worth of dirt, animal droppings, and rotted wood.

While he worked, he kept up a cheery conversation with Gina. Elaine kept interrupting, insisting that the Schapens burned children in the old bunkhouse.

“Gina will find the bones, and then they'll go to prison, bad, nasty people, with their calf. Do you know, Farmer Jim, you have to have a penis to see that calf?
You
could go look at it, but I can't. And then I tried to show them how we used to do protests back in the sixties, and they dragged me away, and Gina wouldn't even give me a drink. I'm thirsty now, and she won't let me have her wine. That's selfish and mean.”

When Jim offered her his water jug, she said, in her horrid, little-girl voice, “He's teasing Baby Elaine. He wants her to drink nastiness.”

He'd drunk most of the gallon of water himself by the time he'd cleared away enough of the dirt that he could wriggle into the back area, where Gina was pinned. He'd had to use a trowel for the last few feet. He played his flashlight around and saw Gina lying about four feet from him, the main beam of the roof perched on more of the decomposing siding about three inches from her head.

“Hi, Jim,” she called when she saw him emerge through his tunnel.

“Hey, Gina, hang in there.” He whistled through his teeth, trying to figure out how to approach her. “I can't get a hold on anything to pull that wood away. It's all so soft that if I try to move the sides, the beam will fall on you. I'm going to shovel this dirt away, make you a little tunnel so you can crawl out from underneath.”

In another forty minutes, he'd dug a deep enough trench that Gina was able to crawl to him. He pushed her ahead of him through the first tunnel. When they reached the outside, she tried to stand, but shock and exposure made her tremble too violently to get up. He carried her to the cart and looked doubtfully at Elaine.

“I'm going to get you inside, get you warm, and then I'll figure out what to do with her.”

Gina's teeth were chattering but she managed to grin. “Thanks, Superman. I know you'll think of something.”

I
T WAS AFTER TEN
by the time he'd returned all his equipment to the cart. Elaine was lying on the ground nearby, snoring loudly. When she didn't respond to her name or a sharp shake of her shoulder, he poured the remains of his water jug on her. She looked up at him blindly in the tractor headlights and then swore at him with a startling viciousness. She called him names he'd never heard. When he tried to get her into the cart, she accused him of trying to kill her.

“Then you can walk to the house.”

He was so exhausted he could hardly bring himself to climb up on the tractor, let alone behave with reasonable civility. When he'd crawled up into the seat, he turned around and saw Elaine trying to scramble into the cart. He waited, his skin itching with fatigue, until she toppled in, then drove back to the house, trying to hit every hole he could find.

He left the tractor, with Elaine still in the cart, in the drive while he went inside to say good-night to Gina. If Elaine hadn't emerged from the cart when he went back out, he'd unhitch it and leave it in the Fremantle yard until tomorrow.

Gina had taken a shower and was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a hot drink. Her dark hair was springing up in little ringlets around her face. She had on a severe dressing gown that zipped up to a high collar and covered her down to her toes, but when she moved the lines of her body were unmistakable. Jim squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting to think, not wanting to imagine.

She got to her feet. “Jim, I can't begin to thank you properly. I'd be dead if not for you.”

He managed a smile, swaying slightly in the doorway. “Life in the country, Gina. We help each other if we can.”

“You're going to fall over in another second!” she cried. “Why don't you spend the night here? You can clean up, if you don't mind smelling like blood—sorry, that's the way the rusty water smells to me. I'll make you a drink, and you can crash on the daybed in my study.”

Jim thought about riding home. It was only five minutes away, but it meant returning to Susan's angry, inert presence, to his daughter—Lara! How could he have forgotten her, out somewhere with Robbie Schapen?

He had to get back, he was starting to say, when Lara phoned him. She was frantic because the truck and car were both in the yard but he had disappeared.

“Lulu, you okay? Gina Haring got herself trapped in the wreck of the old bunkhouse. I've just finished digging her out…No, I don't know what she was doing there…She's fine, just shaken up…Did you get dinner?…Okay. I may have a drink before I come home, so you get to bed, sweetheart.”

When he hung up, he collapsed in the other kitchen chair. “I should go home. Susan isn't in great shape, and I don't like to leave Lulu alone with her.”

Gina stood without speaking and steamed a mug of milk for him at her espresso machine, then poured brandy in it. “I have to hide all the alcohol from Elaine, which makes it hard to have a drink when I need one. What did you do with her?”

“She's in the cart.” He gulped down the hot, sweet milk. He hadn't eaten since the pancakes he'd had with Lara at noon; the brandy hit him almost at once, making his eyelids thick but soothing his itching skin. “I'd still like to know what you were doing in that bunkhouse, but not tonight, not when I'm one inch from falling asleep.”

He finished the drink, but when he stood he realized he wasn't in any shape to drive the tractor, even the half mile to his farmyard. He let Gina find him a pair of old Mr. Fremantle's pajamas and a towel.

If he hadn't been so very tired and so very filthy, he couldn't have brought himself to stand under the shower. The glass door and the shower floor were thick with orange scum and rust had dug deep grooves in the metal walls. How had Liz Fremantle lived with this all those years? And how did Gina, so fastidious in her appearance, tolerate it?

Even so, the physical pleasure of hot water on his dirty head and arms felt so good that he stood there until the water began running cold. When he got out of the bathroom, Gina was sitting on the bottom of the stairs outside the door.

She stood with an effort. “I'm dead on my feet, too.”

She led him up the stairs, past the bare laths where the plaster had fallen out, to the back bedroom where she tried to write. “I'm sorry about Susan, Jim. I've been a bad friend, but I'll come over this week to see her, truly I will.”

He couldn't muster the strength to answer, just stumbled around her small worktable and fell onto the daybed. He didn't even ask about Elaine, although his last conscious thought was to wonder if she had passed out in his cart.

When he woke, the room was dark. He stretched a hand out for the bedside clock and panicked as his fingers closed on air. For a moment, as his hand flailed, he couldn't think where he was or why his joints ached so. And then he remembered: Gina Haring.

In the dark room, he felt desire lick up his legs. Get your clothes on, Farmer Jones, get your clothes on and go home where you belong.

He found the lamp on Gina's worktable and looked at his watch, which he'd dropped on the floor with his clothes last night. It was five in the morning: his mind said that was time to get up, even after a night of heavy work, even in a strange room. Which was good. He could get home before Lara woke and save himself the embarrassment of trying to explain why he'd been gone all night.

He stood, trying to stretch the kinks from his tired body. He was supposed to spread fertilizer on his wheat fields today—he hoped he didn't fall asleep on the tractor. He picked up his clothes from the chair where he'd flung them last night. They were too foul to contemplate wearing again. He instead zipped his jacket over Mr. Fremantle's pajamas and rolled his jeans into a ball. He'd managed to shove one of his socks all the way under the daybed; his knees protested loudly as he knelt to fish it out.

As he brushed away the dust bunnies clinging to his sock, he found a small photograph, a yellowing black-and-white shot of a youth with a thin, dark face and a mop of thick hair, almost an Afro. He stared at the picture, puzzled. He thought he recognized the wide, sensitive mouth, but it wasn't one of the Fremantles.

He was too tired; he couldn't put his own name to his own face this morning let alone some thirty-year-old photograph. He laid it on Gina's worktable. As he bent to pull on his socks, though, the memory came to him: Jim himself as a boy, sitting in front of Grandpa on the big tractor. They were harrowing corn—at least, he had a vivid picture of the bright green stalks. And then Grandpa got angry:
“Not in my field, young man.”
Grandpa set the brake on the tractor and jumped down. The youth had been angry, but the young woman he was with had laughed at Grandpa in a saucy way. She'd had hair the same color as cornsilk, and it hung down over her like a waterfall.

It was this man, Jim thought. He was using the cornfield as a place to have sex. At the time, Jim couldn't make sense of the scene, nor of Grandpa's anger:
“In front of the boy,”
he spat at Gram over lunch.
“How could they do that in front of the boy?”

That made Jim think it was wicked to have your clothes off in front of a child, or out of doors, even though Gram said, “Now, Nathan, they couldn't have known you'd be harrowing there today with Jimmy. They're bone ignorant about farming. Just don't tell Myra—she's trying to get the sheriff to arrest that whole bunkhouse, and throw in Liz Fremantle for good measure.”

Right after that, someone had killed all the marijuana plants the hippies were growing behind the barn. Jim and Doug had always assumed Myra did that—but what if it had been Grandpa, angry about sex in the cornfield? And then had come the fire in the bunkhouse, which had driven away all the hippies, including this one.

Jim had never known the name of the boy who died in the fire. Maybe it had even been this one, the one in the picture. The boy probably hadn't been much older than Chip. And Jim didn't even know his name!

He was sitting on the bed, lost in space, holding his socks, when Gina appeared, still wearing her green dressing gown.

“I thought I'd sleep round the clock, but I kept jumping awake, thinking the ceiling was collapsing on me. I saw the light and figured you couldn't sleep, either.”

“I'm always awake around five; my body doesn't know any better.” He gestured at her worktable. “I found this picture under the bed. I think maybe it was one of the hippies in the bunkhouse.”

Gina looked at it, but shook her head. “I've never seen it—unless—Elaine gave me her college transcript, trying to prove to me she was smart enough to help me write a novel—maybe this picture was with it?”

She picked up a crumpled document from her worktable and handed it to Jim. The seal of the University of Kansas's registrar announced it as the “Official Record of Elaine Logan.” In the spring and fall of 1969—the end of her sophomore and beginning of her junior years—Elaine had received A's in the Victorian Novel and the Honors English Seminar, B's in all her other subjects. In the spring of 1970, she'd failed one class and dropped the others. In the fall of 1970, she'd withdrawn.

“I didn't know she'd been a student at the university—it's hard to picture.”

Gina's shoulders sagged. “She's going to drive me into an insane asylum. Some days she'll quote reams of nineteenth-century poetry: she knows ‘Barbara Frietchie' by heart, and I'll hear her declaiming,
‘“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country's flag,”'
or,
‘Christ! What are patterns for?'
A minute later, she'll start talking baby talk, and want to pretend I'm her mother.”

Jim laughed softly. When Gina said crossly that it wasn't funny, he apologized. “It's just life I'm laughing at. I don't want to go home because Susan won't talk to me, and you don't want to be here because Elaine won't stop talking.”

Gina made a face. “You can say that again. Elaine says she lived in the bunkhouse when it was a commune. Is that true?”

Jim shrugged. “That's what Liz Fremantle said. I guess Elaine left Lawrence after the fire. Whatever she did in between didn't do her a whole lot of good. A mental hospital, where they kept her in restraints, gave her all those drugs. That's what I did hear from Curly—Tom Curlingford—who works for me, but I never know if what he reports is true or not.”

“I don't think Elaine's psychotic, just addled,” Gina said.

“Is that why you were excavating the bunkhouse? To find out if she really lived there or not? I wouldn't think there'd be any evidence after all this time.” Jim smiled.

Gina flushed. “You and Susan told me about the boy who was killed in the bunkhouse. Elaine keeps talking about him, too, but she also says her baby died in the fire. Maybe it sounds ghoulish, but I wanted to see.”

“Excavating for bones?” Jim's amusement fled. “It does sound ghoulish. Don't you have anything better to do with your time?”

Gina stiffened. “I am so tired of every mortal soul in this county sitting in judgment on me. My New York friends warned me that people out here were narrow-minded. I should have listened to them.”

“We're no more narrow-minded than city people who sit in judgment on us for thinking differently than they do,” Jim objected.

Gina smiled brittlely. “Arnie Schapen sicced the fire department on our midsummer fire. He also was pretty crude in the response he organized to our K-PAW march last winter, as you should remember.”

“I certainly do remember,” Jim said with a spurt of anger. “How can you say we're narrow-minded after that, after my wife danced around your bonfires, and even got arrested taking part in a group you drew her into? And then—Oh, my God, Gina, is it all a game with you? The fact that my wife turned her energy to the anti-war movement, that my son went to Iraq and was killed. Did that matter to you at all, or were you just playacting, trying to pretend you were some sixties hippie?”

“It's not playacting, Jim. My own life is in turmoil. Not on the scale yours is, maybe, but I keep screwing around trying to figure out how to make a living and getting more and more stultified out here by myself. I thought I could write a book about the dead boy in the bunkhouse, that it would be a way of using this time here productively.”

She came to sit next to him. “The only thing I will apologize for is neglecting Susan, and that's because I haven't known what to say to her. It's cowardice that's kept me away, not malice, or—or because I think her life is a game. Do you honestly believe I'm responsible for your son's death? I know your man Blitz does—he treats me as if I were every plague ever visited on the land of Egypt.”

“Blitz isn't my man, or anyone else's,” Jim said irritably. “I don't hold you responsible for my son's decisions, but Susan must have told you how hard your anti-war group was on her relationship with him.”

“Of course, but I only heard it from her side. She felt he was trying to dictate to her what she could do, who her friends should be. I agreed that no man should dictate her political beliefs or actions, especially not her son. No woman, for that matter. Anyway, even if I were a fairy-tale witch and could have foretold the future, seen your son's death in a crystal ball, how could I have stopped Susan from participating in the anti-war movement or my bonfires?”