The Rise of Rachel Stark (4 page)

"First, let me tell you a little about myself.
I was telling your parents, and I'll tell you. You have nothing to
be afraid of. Everything is going to be just fine. I have been
aborting pregnancies for 14 years, and I know what I'm doing. I've
never lost a client, and that is the absolute truth.

"I started doing this because I
thought I could save lives. That's right,
save
lives. I lost two very dear
friends in close succession many years ago because their
pregnancies were aborted by men who had
no
idea
what they were doing. And they
charged exorbitant fees for what they did.

"Well, I have had two years of
medical school. I think it is important that you know that. I am
not some junkie off the street who thinks she can just pick up a
coat hanger and make an easy buck. I had to drop out of medical
school for financial reasons, but even so, I did not get into this
practice because I thought it would make me rich. I got into it
because I thought it would make me
useful
. As I said, I thought I could
provide a service that would save lives. Maybe I could even have
saved the lives of my two friends. In any case, I think I
have
saved lives. In
fact, I'm sure of it.

"One other thing. I am
not
committed to going
through with this procedure. Not at all. That might surprise you.
But if you and your parents were to decide
right now
that you want to change
your minds, I will pick up my case and leave, and you will never
see me again. Do you understand that, Rachel?"

Rachel opened her mouth as if to speak. She
was groping for her voice, but no sound came forth.

Finally, in a faint whisper that seemed almost
otherworldly, Rachel said, "Help … me … "

Celeste turned to look at Mom and
Dad.

"We've … we've decided to do this," Benjamin
Stark said in a soft voice. "We've been all through this, time and
time again. I'm sorry, Rachel."

Holly Stark wept. Her shoulders
shook.

Celeste reached into her case and pulled out a
little bottle.

"Well," she said. "We can't do anything right
now. She's too tense. Her body is rigid. It wouldn't be a good idea
to get started now."

Celeste picked up a glass of water on the
homemade wooden chair that served as a nightstand by the
bed.

"Rachel," she said, "this is a tranquilizer.
It will relax you and make you feel much better, I promise. Dad,
will you help me raise her a bit so she can take this?

"Then we'll wait 20 minutes and see where we
are."

Chapter Five

Why Rachel?

"It's the cemetery!" Tabby cried, breaking the
group's long silence.

"Where?" someone asked.

"At the top of the hill," Tabby said. "I can
see that big iron arch."

"Yeah, I think I see it too," Bull
said.

"That means we probably have a little more
than a mile to go," Sheldon said. "We're almost there."

"Thank god," Jimmy said. "I'm getting cold
feet." He paused. "I mean that literally." He paused again. "It was
a joke."

They all wanted to laugh, but no one did. What
Jimmy said was too close to the truth.

They hunched their shoulders against the wind.
From time to time they broke into a slow jog. But mostly they
withdrew into their own private worlds. Like the birds in flight,
they all wondered in unison how it came about that they were
trudging up a snowy road on Christmas Eve to help a girl they
hardly knew, and why they were so drawn to her.

Bull Evenshot

Bull remembered how Jimmy drove him home after
an ice skating party on the frozen Missouri River one Saturday
night a couple of years ago.

It was a night he thought about every day, and
probably would think about it every day for the rest of his life.
But tonight the images were clearer, the pain more intense than
usual.

●●●

"See ya," Jimmy said as Bull got
out of the car.

"Later," Bull said.

Bull looked out the front window
of his living room and watched until Billy's taillights disappeared
down the street. He ran his finger across the ice that had formed
on the windowpane. He squinted to get a look at the thermometer
mounted alongside the window outside: 6 degrees below zero. He
wondered whether the cherry vodka he drank at the party would keep
his breath from freezing on the windowpane. He blew on the glass
and watched it fog up and begin to freeze, giving the street light
on the corner an odd, fuzzy glow.

Behind him, the wood stove had
nearly gone out. He laid his hand on its flat, black surface.
Almost cold. He shuddered. His parents would not be up for several
hours. By then, the house would be an icebox.

He opened the door to the stove
and jostled the dying embers with a long iron. He decided there was
enough fire left to catch some new wood.

He threw in three, then four, then
five pieces of wood. He left the door open for a few minutes to
give the fire more air, until the wood ignited. The stove was so
full of wood he had to force the stove door shut. Then he went to
bed.

By the time the smoke that had
drifted into Bull's bedroom woke him up, the living room was
ablaze. When he saw it, he screamed for his parents, whose bedroom
was at the other end of the house.

Getting no answer, he retreated
from the heat and ran back into his room and closed the door. He
flipped the light switch, but there was no power. He had gone to
bed mostly dressed, and had only to put on his shoes, which he
groped for in the dark and finally found. It seemed to take his
shaking hands forever to pull them on.

He could feel the heat on his
door. He could smell the paint on it starting to blister. There was
no way out except his bedroom window. He tried to open it, but it
was frozen shut. He fumbled in his closet for his baseball bat. He
could hear the thunderous roar of the fire. Flames licked around
the edges of the door, and he choked from the smoke.

Finally he laid his hands on the
bat. He crawled to the window and smashed it. The frigid air rolled
in. He could feel the jagged glass cut into his arms, his stomach,
his thighs as he pulled himself through the opening and fell out
into the snow.

By now, the living room roof had
collapsed, and the fire was moving rapidly toward both ends of the
house. Bull, dripping blood, ran through the snow to his parents'
bedroom and screamed their names. There was no sign of movement
inside.

Suddenly the room exploded in
flames. Bull backed up, then ran toward the bedroom window and
hurled his body through the glass. He flew into the room and landed
at his father's bare feet. Fighting to stay conscious, he grabbed
his dad's legs and pulled him outside through the
window.

They landed in a heap in the snow,
and Bull was able to drag him several yards away from the house. He
started to run back for his mother when the entire roof gave way
with a monstrous roar, and the house became an inferno.

Bull staggered back, sank to his
knees at his father's side and rocked back and forth, unable to
speak. He felt a faint tug on his sleeve. His father was still
alive and was trying to say something. Bull leaned down to
him.

"It's all right," his dad
whispered. "You're a good boy."

The house had burned nearly to the
ground when the fire truck pulled up. Bull, smeared with soot and
frozen blood, was still rocking back and forth, chanting an ancient
Siouan prayer he did not even know he knew, still kneeling beside
his father, whose blackened body lay lifeless, steaming in the
midnight snow.

●●●

That was the connection to Rachel, Bull said
to himself as he and his friends walked up Cemetery Road. He knew
it all along. He just had to remind himself. Remind himself of his
early life on the reservation, watching young Indian men drink
themselves to death, or kill each other with guns and knives, or
rip themselves to bloody pieces in car wrecks. He traveled the same
road Rachel did. The dirt road of poverty, of having people look
down on you because you're poor, of knowing that death is always
nearby.

But no one, no white man, no politician, no
one ever, could tell Bull his father was not one of the finest men
who ever walked this Earth.

"He told me I was a good boy," Bull said
aloud. "Death had him in its grasp, and he told me … I was a good
boy."

Tears streamed down his cheeks and fell into
the snow.

Jimmy Blaze

Why, Jimmy wondered, was his life so full of
tragic figures?

His father was killed in the Korean War. His
death was almost more than Jimmy's mother could bear. She sought
solace in strong drink and weak men, and for a long time Jimmy
worried that she would die too soon as well. And just when everyone
thought she had finally conquered her demons, she did.

Die, that is.

And now Rachel Stark. Trailer trash. Poor.
Pregnant and unmarried. An uneducated father with no particular
skills. Welfare recipients. A mother who keeps having baby after
baby after baby. Children who come to school in threadbare
clothes.

Easy targets for scorn and ridicule, the Stark
family. All the ingredients for revilement by people who have a
need to feel superior to others, who have a need to blame someone,
anyone – poor people will do – for all of the country's ills, are
there.

Just like it was for Jimmy and his
mother.

It can even be a deadly list of
ingredients.

Just like it was for Jimmy and his
mother.

Jimmy was afraid he would be too late to save
Rachel.

Just like he was for his mother.

●●●

In the winter of 1963, Penelope
Blaze, Jimmy's mother, looked up at the clock. It was 5:30,
quitting time. But she had five minutes worth of filing left to do,
so she went ahead and did it. Nobody worried about a minute or two,
even an hour or two, one way or the other, at Ray's Feed &
Seed, where she had worked for the past two months as a filing
clerk.

The job came open when Edna
Conkey, who had worked there for almost 32 years, decided to
retire. A month later, Edna died. Must have known it was coming,
the townsfolk said, and so she went home to get
prepared.

When Penelope heard Edna was about
to quit, she mustered her courage and went to talk to Ray Howsley.
Ray wasn't that far from retirement himself, and maybe he was a
little tired and not capable of good judgment anymore. The
townsfolk said that, too, when they heard Ray gave Penelope the
job.

But they changed their minds
pretty quickly. Penelope showed up for work every day, on time,
never missed a day, never late. And she was a hard worker and a
quick learner, Ray said, took to the job like hogs to the
trough.

Ray did a fair amount of gloating
after that, and the townsfolk said, as they usually did with most
things they passed judgment on, that they knew it all
along.

For her part, Penelope seemed
immensely happy. She loved the work, she told everybody, loved the
security of it, how it made her feel about herself.

And she loved the smell of the
feed store, the smell of new-mown hay mingled with the sweetness of
early-spring earth. She couldn't get enough of it, she said, and
every morning when she came into work she would just walk around
the place, drawing in deep breaths.

What's more, she hadn't touched a
drop since she started work. She was even talking about going to
school to learn a trade, or maybe even become a nurse. Ray
encouraged her to do that, said he would help her out any way he
could. He admired her, he told her, for the way she had turned her
life around.

Penelope pushed the last file
drawer shut and straightened up her desk. It was a quarter to six
on a Wednesday. She bid Ray good night and walked out the
door.

Penelope headed straight for
Robbie's Bar, six doors down from the feed store on the same side
of the street. She went in and pulled up onto a barstool. The place
was empty save for a couple of regulars who had come in to get out
of the cold.

The bartender-owner was a beefy,
red-faced giant named Rob Anderson. He once had tattoos on both
forearms that he had tried to have removed. It left him with a pair
of ugly patches of scar tissue. He was wiping down the bar when
Penelope walked in, and he eyed her for a second.

"Penelope," he said. "Haven't seen
you in awhile."

"Hey, Rob."

Rob had heard Penelope was on the
wagon. Everybody in town knew it. "You want something?" he
said.

"Think I'll have a
cigarette."

"Good enough." He picked up his
rag and started wiping again.

Penelope lit up, took a deep drag
and blew the smoke straight at the huge mirror back of the bar. She
wasn't allowed to smoke at the feed store, not that she would have
anyway. The smell there. Nothing like here. Stale beer. Smoke.
Vomit. Urine.