The Influence (8 page)

Ross stood there awkwardly, unsure of what to do or say, uncertain as to what was going on, and it was Lita who filled him in, taking him into the kitchen, away from Dave. “We got a call about a half hour ago,” she said quietly. “Dave’s parents were killed in a car crash.” 

“Oh my God.” 

She nodded. “Some drunk conventioner from Des Moines driving a rented SUV. Head-on collision. Neither of them made it to the hospital.” 

He didn’t know what to say. What
could
a person say at a time like this that wasn’t trite and ineffectual? 

A bitterness crept into Lita’s voice. “The drunk driver, of course, survived.” 

“I’m so sorry,” Ross said. “Is there anything you want…I mean, what can I…?” 

“We have to go to Las Vegas. We could be gone for awhile,” she said. “A week, maybe. I don’t know. Do you think—” 

“Don’t worry about it,” he assured her. “I’ll take care of everything. I’ll even sell at the market if you need me to.” 

“I’m not sure we’ll have enough
to
sell, based on what you brought in today.” She touched his shoulder, spoke softly. “Thank you, though. I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know what we’d do if you weren’t.” 

“When are you leaving?” Ross asked. 

“In the morning. I’m driving, but I want him to get some sleep. I’m worried about him.” 

Ross nodded.  

“I was wondering…” She seemed hesitant. 

“What?” 

“If we could borrow your car. The truck’s been making some weird noises, and another long trip might—” 

Ross cut her off. “Of course,” he said.  

She threw her arms around his shoulders, giving him a grateful hug. “Thank you.” 

They returned to the living room. Dave seemed slightly more alert, though definitely not his normal self. He looked up at them as they entered. “She told you?” 

“Yeah. I’m sorry…” That sounded lame. “For your loss.” That sounded lamer. He stood there awkwardly, not saying anything more, hoping that silence would be more effective at expressing his feelings than his words had been. 

Dave looked at Lita. “Is it all right?” 

“Yes,” she assured him. “He’ll take care of everything.” 

“We’re sorry to do this to you,” Dave apologized. 

Ross waved him away. “You have more important things to deal with right now. In fact, I’m going to leave you two alone, so you can…do…whatever you need to do.”
Stupid!
He glanced over at Lita. “Unless you need me for something.” 

“No, you go on.” She tried to smile, but just looked sad and tired. 

“Okay, then. I’m there if you need me, though. Just…give me a call.” He left before he embarrassed himself, and after making a sandwich for dinner, he watched the national news, turned off the TV, checked his email, turned on the TV, tried to play a video game, walked restlessly onto the porch, then settled down to watch a
Doctor Who
DVD. The lights went off in the Big House around nine, and he waited a half-hour to make sure he wasn’t needed before going to bed himself. 

Exhausted by the stress of the day, he fell asleep instantly.  

In the morning he awoke early, while it was still dark, hoping to see them off, but they’d already gone. Lita had left a note taped to his screen door, telling Ross that he could use their house while they were gone and to help himself to anything in the kitchen. She said there were instructions for him on the kitchen table, and when he went over to the Big House, he found that Dave had provided a feeding schedule for the horse and the goat, as well as detailed directions for monitoring the bees, and watering the garden and the fruit trees. 

It was another bad day for egg harvesting—he collected exactly ten—but whatever was wrong went far beyond poor egg production. The chickens themselves seemed…different. If he told anyone about it he would sound crazy, but several times he thought he caught some of the hens peeking at him from behind a wall of the coop. Watching him.
Spying
on him. That made no sense, of course, was probably not even possible, but it creeped him out nevertheless, and he hurriedly fed the fowl and collected all the eggs he could find before bailing. 

He was afraid of the bees, so he stayed away from them. They’d survive for a day without being scrutinized, and if Lita and Dave weren’t back by tomorrow evening, he’d check on the hives the following morning. He was also afraid of the horse and goat, he was embarrassed to admit, and without his cousin or her husband around to run interference for him, he threw the hay over the fence in the horse’s general direction and dumped the feed in an area where he knew the goat would find it. He had no problem watering the garden.  

Along with instructions, Dave had left him a list of the customers who might come by during the week to pick up their standing orders, and one of them arrived that afternoon, Ben Stanard, the old man from the grocery store. He was no less hostile out of his natural environment, and Ross actually experienced a small sense of satisfaction when the store owner demanded twelve dozen eggs and he told Stanard he could only have six. 

The old man glared at him. “My order’s for twelve.” 

“Sorry.” He felt like smiling, but he didn’t. 

“Where’s Dave?” Stanard demanded. “Let me talk to him.” 

“He and his wife are out of state right now. Family emergency. I’m in charge until they get back.” 

“We had a deal.” 

“I’m sorry, but there’s a production problem. I have no control over that.” 

The store owner frowned, spit on the ground, then walked over to the handtruck where Ross had stacked the egg cartons. “This is bullshit,” the old man growled as he loaded them up in his SUV. “Dave’s gonna hear about this!”  

This time, Ross did smile. “Have a nice day!” he called out. 

Lita called in the evening. She sounded tired. The funeral, she said, was going to be held on Wednesday. She thought they would probably be back by the weekend. It was only a preliminary estimate, but with the life insurance and the assets, and the fact that Dave was his parents’ only child, she said they could be getting something close to a million dollars. 

He was silent, stunned. 

“Are you still there?” she asked. 

“A million dollars?” he said incredulously. 

“They had a lot of insurance.” There was sadness in her voice but also an audible relief, and Ross realized that, egg problems or not, Lita and Dave would probably now be in the position to have the ranch they always wanted. 

“So what’s happening there?” she asked. “Is everything all right?” 

He described his day.  

After Ben Stanard had left that afternoon, Ross had gone into the cellar on the side of the house to do inventory. There were more eggs stored there than he realized (he probably
could
have given the store owner his full order), and quite a few jars of honey. He told Lita now that he wanted to sell at the farmer’s market on Thursday—if she and Dave would trust him with the truck—and she gave him permission to go ahead, though he could tell that she didn’t care one way or the other. He understood. There were far more important things on her mind at the moment. He didn’t want to bother her with details, so he assured her that everything was fine here at home, then told her to make sure she got enough sleep before he hung up.  

In the morning, he forced himself to check out the bees. In his note, Dave had said that if Ross carefully followed all of the instructions, the bees would neither swarm nor sting, and, indeed, that was the case. He was too untrained to be able to extract honey or even tell if honey was being produced, but the bees themselves were fine, and that would suffice until Dave returned to take over. 

Again, the chickens acted odd, and this time one of them actually pecked his ankle. The pain was immediate and much greater than he would have expected, and instinctively Ross reacted by kicking the animal, sending it squawking away, flapping its prodigious feathers. He felt bad about that until he looked down at his ankle, pulled up his pantleg and saw blood, a trail of it dripping down his skin and into his sock. Angrily, he looked up, but the attacking bird had blended into the pack. Good thing for it; because he would have kicked the animal again if he could find it. 

Ross tossed out the rest of the feed, dumping it in a pile rather than sprinkling it across the yard, and postponed egg collection until he washed off his wound and put a couple of Band-Aids over the surprisingly deep gash. When he did return to the yard, he found only two eggs, one unusually small and one extraordinarily big. Neither looked like anything that could be sold, and though he didn’t really want to touch them, he picked both up and took them to the root cellar, leaving them in the basket. Dave could check them out when he returned. Maybe he could figure out what was wrong. 

Ross finished his chores and had an early lunch, making himself a sandwich and washing it down with some Beck’s.  

He felt weird and ill-at-ease. It was daytime and his computer was on, but the ranch still seemed creepy. He was all alone here aside from the horse, the goat, the bees and those freaky chickens, and he was far enough away from town or the nearest house that, as the movie tagline said, no one could hear him scream. So if he tripped and conked his head on a rock, or if he choked on his food and suffocated, there’d be no one to rescue him. 

Tripped or choked? 

That wasn’t really what spooked him, was it? 

No. It was something less tangible, and for some reason he found himself thinking about Christmas night, when he’d seen—or, more precisely,
felt
—that big black thing swooping low and silent over the ranch. Goose bumps popped up on his arms, and he decided to call Alex, knowing he’d feel better if he had someone to talk to. 

His cellphone battery was dead, though he’d just charged it last night, so he used the land line in the shack to phone his friend. The news was not good. Just as Ross had had to abandon his life in Phoenix in order to survive, Alex was planning to move to Salt Lake City, where he’d found a job as an IT supervisor for a small company that made rubber floor mats. 

The news made Ross depressed. “Kind of far afield, isn’t it?” 

“I won’t have to declare bankruptcy.”  

“But you’re an engineer.” 

“So are you.” 

Ross looked out his window at the chicken coop. “You’re right.” 

They spent the next hour commiserating, catching up on the doings of their other friends, glumly appraising their respective futures, and by the time he hung up, Ross no longer felt afraid. His apprehension had been stupid and childish, nothing more than a symptom of cabin fever, and he decided to take the pickup and drive into town. There wasn’t much to do in Magdalena, so he ended up going into the bar, where the only other patron was Jackass McDaniels, the handyman, who remembered him from the farmer’s market and invited Ross over by patting the stool next to him and saying, “Sit your ass down, bud. Any cousin a Lita’s…ah, you know the drill.” 

Ross ordered a beer and asked the question he’d wanted to ask since meeting the man. “So is your name really Jackass? Your parents didn’t name you that, did they?” 

The handyman shrugged. “Might as well’ve been my name. That’s what my old man called me. My momma always called me Chester—that’s my given name—but my daddy never called me nuthin’ but Jackass. When the old bastard died—praise the Lord—I decided to sort of reclaim the word, make it good. You know, kinda how the blacks did with n—”  

“I get it.” Ross held up a hand. “So is your mom still alive?” 

He shook his head sadly. “Died a couple a years ago, God rest her soul. But she was good up to the last. No oldtimer’s disease or cancer or nuthin’. She just died in her sleep, peaceful like, and there wasn’t none of that wastin’ away or loss of memory. It was a good life, and she went out on top.” He drained half his beer glass in one chug. “How about you? Momma and daddy still alive?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Not that close, huh?” 

Ross was surprised. “You can tell?” 

“Got a sixth sense about these things. People with daddy issues can always spot a fellow traveler. Want to talk about it?” 

“Not really.” 

“Okay.” McDaniels finished his beer and ordered another. 

Ross nursed his drink. “So, have you always lived here?” 

“Magdalena born and bred.” 

“And was your dad a handyman, too?” 

“Nah. A farmer. And a shitty one at that. We lived in a trailer in the middle of a dead field where he was always trying to grow cotton. He grew
some
, I guess, and we raised enough animals to kinda eke out a crappy existence. But after he keeled over—heart attack—my momma and I sold the land to Holt, who was trying to expand his ranch at the time. A lot of other people at that end of the valley already sold, so we were pretty much the last holdouts. Momma was tough, and we ended up gettin’ some decent money. I was of age then, and I convinced her to buy a little plot of land up close to the mountain here, and me and a few buddies put up a house, plumbing, wiring and all. I was pretty good at it, so I just kept on. That’s how I became a handyman. Now I can fix or build just about anything.” He nodded at Ross. “You’re…what? Some kind of scientist?” 

“Engineer.” 

“What’re you doin’ here?” 

“I can’t find a job.” 

“I thought that was a good racket to go into, engineering. I heard there’re lots of jobs available.” 

“You heard wrong.” 

The two of them talked for awhile about how hard it was to make a living these days—“Although, I’m pretty sure it always has been,” McDaniels said—and then Ross got up and said he had to go. 

“Well, nice talkin’ to you,” McDaniels told him. “And if you or your cousin ever need some work done…you know where to find me.” 

“Here.” 

“Most afternoons.”  

Ross drove back to the ranch. He decided to prepare early for the farmer’s market tomorrow and get things ready, so he put the sign and the folding table in the truck, boxed up a dozen jars of honey and counted out ten egg cartons, about half of the amount in the cellar. On a whim, he decided to check if the hens had laid any more eggs, and when he went out to the coop, he was surprised to find that they had. He collected nearly two dozen, in fact, all of them normal looking. As it was getting late, he took them down to the cellar and left them in the baskets, intending to sort them tomorrow. Not only had none of the chickens attacked him this time, most of them had been hiding, and while that was definitely weird, he was not complaining. It was better than being pecked.