Eddie’s Prize (12 page)

“Oh, Dane.” Lisa took the handkerchief and quickly mopped her eyes. She put on a more cheerful face. “Thank you. Eddie’s right down there with Mr. Gray.”

Dane hesitated. “Is there anything I can do? You’re upset.”

She straightened with a determinedly cheerful smile. “Oh, no, thanks.”

He looked at the magazine in her lap. “You must be homesick,” he said sympathetically. “I can only imagine how difficult it must be to suddenly find yourself back in the Stone Age. You know, I’ve seen your picture in magazines from the Times Before. Mr. Gray showed them to me when I was young. In fact, that’s what I’m here for today, to look at them again. I have to admit, I had something of a crush on you while I was growing up.”

Dane was nowhere near as handsome as Eddie, but Lisa could see how attractive he was with his square jaw and sun-bleached blond hair. Lisa smiled automatically at his compliment.

“I wish the notice for the Bride Fight would have gotten to me in time.” Dane’s eyes searched hers. “I would have won you and treated you like a princess.”

It soothed her distress to see the genuine admiration in his face, but she said primly, “Eddie won, and he treats me just fine.”

“Yes, he’s a lucky man. While you’re waiting for him, could you show me any of your technology? Eddie and I are working together to bring some conveniences to our area. If you have anything with you, I’d love to see it.”

Lisa pulled her purse into her lap. “Sure. I have my phone. I just got it last month… Well, a month before I came here.” She struggled against the tears again. “It has about a million apps.”

Dane sat down on the bench with her. He was a little closer than she liked, but even living in L.A. competing with bitchy models for the best jobs hadn’t rubbed her Minnesota Nice off, so she didn’t say anything. She just scooted a little farther away against the arm of the bench and opened her purse. Dane leaned down to watch as she opened her phone to demonstrate how it used to work.

“The battery is dead,” she explained, “but even when it had some power, it didn’t work. At first we thought we were so far into the boonies there wasn’t coverage. I could still see my stored messages and pictures, but I couldn’t connect to anything.”

“Hmm.” Dane nodded his head like he knew what she was talking about. “May I?”

Lisa handed him the phone, bending and leaning closer to show him how to turn it on.

“Dane!”

Lisa jumped six inches at least at Eddie’s roar. She jerked her head up to see her husband running at them, boots thundering like gunshots against the floor.

“I’m gonna kill you!” Eddie yelled

Lisa gaped open-mouthed, clutching her purse as Eddie lifted Dane by his neck and threw him several feet away. Eddie’s face was so twisted by rage he hardly looked like himself. Her phone flew out of Dane’s hand to smash on the floor.

Eddie stood with a snarl on his lips. “Dane, you woman stealer, if you ever come near my wife again I
will
kill you.”

Dane got up and came back down the hall with heavy, deliberate footsteps. “I’m coming near her, Eddie,” he taunted. “She should have been mine.”

“But she’s not.” Eddie’s voice dropped so low it sounded like he was filtering it through grinding rocks. “She’s mine. Wife stealers get hanged, Dane. So keep away if you want to live.”

Dane reached behind his belt and brought out a knife. “I’m not gonna
steal
Lisa. I challenge you for her.”

“Challenge accepted!” Eddie snapped back at him, his voice an icicle breaking and shattering on pavement.

Lisa leaped up, spilling her purse. “Wait! What are you—”

Eddie turned his head and looked at her as coldly as he looked at Dane. “Shut up, Lisa.”

Utterly shocked, she stared in bewildered hurt.

“Tomorrow, noon, in the Old Theater,” Dane confirmed. His smile was a sneer. “Enjoy your wife one more night, Eddie. We’ll bury you tomorrow.” He inclined his head once to Lisa, his sneer turning to an intimate smile that chilled her. “Until tomorrow, love.”

Lisa saw how the smile enraged Eddie. “I don’t want you!” she shrieked at him. “Why are you doing this?”

Dane didn’t answer. He turned to walk away. Mr. Gray blocked him. He had somehow changed from a stooped old man in a frayed cardigan sweater to a dignified elder. “Dane, Mrs. Madison already said she doesn’t want you for a husband. Eddie isn’t going to give her up. You have no grounds for a challenge.”

“I never had a chance to win her. No one told me about the Bride Fight until it was too late.”

Mr. Gray shook his head. “Not good enough. I forbid you to challenge Eddie.”

There was a tense silence between the three men. Then, amazingly, Dane backed down. His face was as hard as marble, and his eyes narrowed with fiercely controlled fury. “I withdraw my challenge,” he told Eddie stiffly. To Lisa he said, “Ever since I was a teenager and I saw your pictures in those old magazines, I have wanted a woman just like you. I would have done everything I could to make you happy.”

Lisa tried to find something to say, but there were no words. Eddie started making a deep, threatening growl in his throat. Dane turned again to leave, and this time Mr. Gray let him pass. After a few seconds of silence, Lisa bent to retrieve the scattered contents of her purse. Her phone was in pieces. Eddie kicked the battery as he turned sharply away from her.

“Eddie,” she began, “what—”

“Don’t speak to me,” he said distantly. “I have some things to do. Mr. Gray, will you look after her for a little while?”

”I sure will,” the old man said quietly. “When will you be back, Eddie?”

“An hour. Perhaps two.”

Eddie turned and strode down the hall, never even glancing at Lisa. She opened her mouth to protest, but Mr. Gray laid a hand on her arm and shook his head. “Come on back to my office, Lisa. We’ll have some tea.”

Lisa gathered the pieces of her phone and hugged them to her breast as she followed him to his office. Eddie had kicked the battery. On purpose? It felt like he’d kicked her heart. She laid the broken phone in a clear space on the desk and her purse on the floor while Mr. Gray put another piece of wood in the fireplace. The warmth of the fire was comforting. She let Mr. Gray pull another chair close to the hearth and give her a cup of herbal mint tea.

“My daughter-in-law grows the mint in her herb garden,” Mr. Gray said chattily. “She dries all kinds of herbs to keep over the winter.”

Lisa tried to reply politely, but aborted words turned to sobs. “What did I do wrong?” she wailed. The handkerchief she clenched was Dane’s, and she wanted to throw it into the fire, but they didn’t have tissues in this rotten place.

“Nothing, really.” Mr. Gray patted her arm sadly. “Eddie just saw the
PopNation
article from the summer of 2014.” He paused delicately.

“The one about me supposedly running around on Brent,” Lisa spat. “That was lies! Brent made it up himself just to get publicity.” Lisa crumpled the handkerchief and thumped a fist onto her thigh. “Did Eddie believe it?”

Mr. Gray looked sad. Maybe guilty? “He may have, in the heat of the moment. But he’ll get over it when you explain.”

“Will he? I’ve never seen him angry. He’s furious! Is it because of this challenge? Eddie told me it’s against the law to steal someone’s wife.”

“Well…” The old man rubbed a hand through his scanty white hair and dropped into his recliner. “Dane didn’t steal you. He challenged Eddie. That’s different. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Of course, Dane had no valid reason to challenge Eddie.”

“What on earth would be a valid reason?”

“Things have changed in fifty years.” The spoon clinked against the old man’s cup as he stirred sugar into his tea. “Women don’t always have the same rights they did in your day. A woman doesn’t always get to choose who to marry.”

“That’s awful! But you didn’t say what would be a valid reason for a fight.”

“Well, a father can give his daughter to the man he chooses, not the man she loves.” Mr. Gray looked down into his tea with a frown. “A challenge can be issued then, and whoever wins gets to be her husband. If the duel between Dane and Eddie had taken place and Dane won, then you would have been Dane’s wife.”

The tea mug he had given her was wonderfully warm. Lisa clenched it in cold hands. “What if I didn’t want to be Dane’s wife? Don’t I get a say?”

“No. This isn’t the Times Before. Like I said, women don’t always have much say nowadays, especially if they don’t have a father or brothers to look after their interests. Hopefully, a father or brother arranges things so the woman is happy. But a woman without male relatives doesn’t have anyone to speak for her. For instance, you don’t have male relatives here to look out for you.”

God, she hated it here. “This world is so crazy! It’s like Women’s Lib never happened. It doesn’t make sense and it’s not fair!”

Mr. Gray’s smile twisted. “I won’t argue about the not fair part, but it does make sense. Forty years ago, only one in three hundred people was a woman. It was a bad time.” His watery blue eyes unfocused as he paused. “People are people. Everyone has good and bad in them. Back then, the bad was magnified. Sometimes a person had to do hard things just to survive. My wife and I walked here from Omaha. Along the way, I learned a lot about how far men will go to get what they want.”

Lisa stared at him. “You walked from Omaha? How far is that?”

Mr. Gray shook his head. “A couple hundred miles. Took us all summer. Might have been less, if we hadn’t had to hide from other people. We made the mistake once of going to a farm to spend the night. It was practically a fort, with a fence around it made from old cars and other junk, and men with shotguns guarding it. At first they told me to get lost. But then they noticed Kylie was a woman and they let us in. There were around thirty men living there, but no women. First they tried to buy Kylie from me. Then they tried to kill me. We had a hell of a time getting out of there.” His eyes were distant, remembering the past. “Other places were like that too.”

“Oh, my God,” said Lisa weakly.

Mr. Gray shook himself. “After that, we avoided people until we came here to Kearney. Ray Madison’s dad was the mayor then. Marty Madison was a hard man, but he tried to make it safe for everyone, especially women. If a man bothered a woman in the slightest way, he was hung. Trials were quick, and sentences were carried out immediately.”

Lisa put her mug down. “That’s horrible!”

“Yes, but it was effective. Kearney is one of the few places where women are safe. From the moment we walked through the gate, Kylie was called Mrs. Gray and treated like a lady. You know how it was in the Times Before. Everyone called everyone by their first names, even if you just met them. It’s not like that here, not anymore. Putting some formality into place sets boundaries. Calling a woman Mrs. Madison reminds us she’s taken and shows respect.”

Lisa stared into the fire. “Shows she’s a possession,” she muttered. “Bought and sold by men.”

“No.” The old man considered. “Well, I guess you would see it that way when Ray had to trade goods for you. But in Kearney, you’ll be respected not only as a woman but also as Eddie’s wife. Other places, one woman marries several men, or the women are shared by all the men in a community. Here, it’s one woman for one man, and marriage is sacred. Ray Madison isn’t quite as harsh as his father was, but a man who misbehaves is likely to be whipped at the least if he bothers a woman. In the last thirty years or more, other towns have made similar rules. From what I’ve heard, this part of Nebraska is considered puritanical.”

“Except for Bride Fights?”

If the old man heard the sarcasm in her voice, he didn’t mention it. “Seems crazy to you, I suppose, but it’s pretty normal here. It’s an accepted, organized way to find a woman with no protection a good husband. Lowlifes aren’t allowed to enter a Bride Fight. We have one every five or ten years or so.” His voice gentled. “Has it been so bad, being married to Eddie?”

Lisa sighed. “Until this afternoon, no. I like Eddie. I think I could love him. But he scared me just now. You know him. Does he have a bad temper?”

Mr. Gray busied himself with the teapot on the table beside his chair. “Well, he does,” he admitted. “But it never lasts long. This is just a tempest in—” He lifted the teapot with a smile. “—a teapot. Can I pour you another cup?”

Lisa handed her mug over. “It’s not my fault. Dane came up to me and wanted to see my phone. I showed it to him. That’s a lot different than me wanting to marry him! I don’t want to marry him. I don’t care what happens, I
won’t
marry him.”

“Sugar?” When Lisa nodded, he carefully dropped a sugar cube into the tea. “Let me tell you about the cultural mores concerning women and marriage.”

Lisa accepted the tea and stirred. “Okay, I’m listening.”

“If a man challenges a husband and kills him, he gets to keep the woman, regardless of her feelings. If the woman’s brothers or cousins don’t like the challenger, they can back the challenger down by making it a big fight instead of one on one. A challenger could be facing half a dozen men or more instead of just the husband. You don’t have a bunch of relatives to step in, so Dane maybe thought he could win you.”

Lisa sipped the tea, wishing it was something stronger. “Asshole.”

“I’ve been teaching Dane about the Times Before for twenty-five years. The library is also the area’s school, and I’ve been the teacher here since I first came to Kearney. Dane is smart, good-looking, and takes good care of his own little community. He would make someone a good husband.”

“Not me!”

“No, not a woman who is already in love with her husband.”

Lisa slanted a glance at the old man under her eyelashes. She wasn’t in love with Eddie. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him. She wrapped her still cold hands around her cup, feeling like a little girl lost in a big parking lot full of tall cars. She couldn’t find the way home. All the cars looked like Eddie’s cold face when he’d kicked her phone battery and turned away from her. “Eddie hates me,” she whispered.

“No, he doesn’t. He’s a little hurt right now. I think if you talk to him, it will be all right. Biggest mistake couples make, I think, is not talking to each other about what’s important. You need to tell him how you feel.” He took a sip of tea and then grinned. “Imagine. Me giving love advice to Lisa Anton! Fifty years ago I never expected to even see you, and here we are.”