The Virgin of Small Plains

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  By the time he got back to the ranch house, Mitch felt both wired and tired, exhilarated by the storm and by his own anger, and also exhausted by them. He’d been up since before dawn. He’d traveled a long way in both the literal and the figurative senses. He’d had a few surprises, none entirely pleasant, and he had even managed to launch the business end of his plan of attack. Practically the only thing he had not managed to do in the long day was see his father. He hadn’t stopped by the old man’s house, had even driven out of his way to avoid that street. He hadn’t gone to the courthouse to look for his father there, hadn’t even been able to bring himself to look up at the tall, wide windows where the courtroom used to be, and most likely still was.

  Now he felt exhausted one minute, and too keyed up the next.

  He knew he’d probably feel better if he could go running, but the idea of running over rough, unfamiliar dirt roads in the dark didn’t appeal to him, so he left his running shoes in his suitcase for now.

  It seemed incredible to him that among all the things he had managed to do on his first day back, one of them was to avoid getting killed by a tornado. But it had also occurred to him that if it had dropped its deadly tail on the ranch, he’d have had to head for the storm cellar.

  He’d better make sure he could actually get the damned thing open.

  It was full nighttime when he approached the old storm cellar with a flashlight in his right hand. He suspected that he had picked this time of night on purpose, just to test his courage. Mitch was damned if he was going to allow a stupid hole in the ground to spook him anymore, as if he were still a boy. He might allow himself to feel frightened of a tornado, but not of a hole in the dirt.

  The grass that he walked through to reach it, behind the house, was still wet.

  His flashlight picked up gleamings in the brush a few yards to either side of him—small creatures, doing their nocturnal things. He stopped for a long moment to listen to one coyote call from the east, and another one reply from the west. There were no bears in Kansas. A few wildcats, yes, but no bears, panthers, crocodiles, or other predators that a grown man had to fear. There were rattlers, but he had found a pair of his father’s old cowboy boots in a closet, and put them on to protect his feet and legs against snake strikes in the uncut grass.

  He felt like an idiot to even be considering such things.

  When he’d been a boy, he’d never thought about predators, except to hope to get to see them, to have great stories to tell his friends.

  At the entrance to the storm cellar, he saw that it was badly overgrown with vines.

  Daring himself not to think about spiders, and cursing himself for having turned into a city boy, he ripped the leaves and tough green cords away with his bare hands, after setting his flashlight on the ground.

  When he had cleared enough away to see the door, he picked up the light again.

  It was a wooden door, dark and splintery now, aged like a cask of wine.

  The metal handle looked so rusted he was loath to touch it.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he muttered to himself. “You’d think I’d never rehabbed an old house or apartment building. You’d think I’d never seen a rat, or cleaned up filthy properties.”

  But it felt different to be standing alone, with only a flashlight, in the country, in the deep darkness. He was a lone human in a million acres of solitude, the last man on Mars, the first man on the moon, that’s how it felt to him. All around him there was a profound silence such as he hadn’t heard in seventeen years. He glanced overhead to see the stars again, just to remind himself they were still there. The Milky Way had been invisible in Kansas City for decades, since even before he had moved there. But here, it still curved and stretched across an endless sky that wasn’t hidden by city lights.

  It was both frightening and deeply satisfying.

  He let out a breath that seemed to come up from his soul, a breath he felt he had been holding onto for almost two decades of his life, a breath that gave him a shuddering release so deep it shocked him.

  “I missed you,” he murmured to the stars.

  And then he laughed out loud, glad there was no one to overhear him.

  “Don’t get attached to anything,” he warned himself. “Remember, there’s no decent cup of coffee for a hundred and fifty miles, or a movie any closer than Emporia. There’s no Krispy Kreme. There’s no—”

  He finally realized there was a padlock on the handle, a big sucker, so rusted and crusted it was invisible until his flashlight shone full on it. How was he going to get in to save himself from a tornado if there was a padlock on the storm cellar door, and he didn’t have the key?

  “Maybe it’s in the house,” he said, out loud. He was beginning to enjoy the luxury of talking to himself out loud, inside or out. Nobody to see him do it. Nobody to hear what he had to say. “Dad probably still has a key, but since I’m not going to ask him for it, that’s not helpful.”

  Then he noticed that the plate that held the hasp through which the lock was looped was loose in the wood. It was all so old, so weather-beaten, that the screws that held all the pieces in place had come loose.

  Mitch couldn’t get his fingers under the plate to give it a pull.

  He flipped his light over and gave the loose screws a few expert knocks with the flashlight handle. It put a few dents in the aluminum, but it did the trick of knocking the plate completely loose.

  The padlock held, but now it held on to a hasp that dangled in air.

  Mitch pulled at the door handle, and was unsurprised to find it didn’t open easily.

  He planted his feet and put his weight and strength into pulling on it.

  When the old door finally gave way, it opened so suddenly it knocked him back.

  Mitch shone his light through the black opening, but that revealed nothing to him.

  He stepped through the doorway, bending over to protect his head from getting bumped on the low doorsill. And then an instinct moved his left hand to brush the wall beside it. Old knowledge had kicked in, causing his fingers to move before his brain knew it was telling them to do it.

  He touched cool plastic. His fingers brushed up.

  To his utter astonishment, electric lights went on in the storm cellar.

  The fact that the wiring still worked—and that it hadn’t been used enough in recent years even to wear out the lightbulbs—didn’t surprise him nearly as much as what he saw in the illumination.

  He thought he remembered only a single light fixture hanging from the ceiling. He thought he remembered only cement floor, walls, ceilings, and the plumbing his mother had put in. And he was pretty sure there used to be a few shelves where his mother had stored fruits and vegetables that friends of hers had canned and given to her.

  But now…there was a single bed, rumpled with sheets as if somebody had gotten out of it that very morning. There was a table with two chairs. There was even a toilet and a sink. There was a small refrigerator. There was a tall wastebasket with a brown paper sack lining it. There was a chest of drawers. There was a rack with hangers, and there were clothes on them, women’s clothes that didn’t look like anything his mother would have worn: short cotton blouses, T-shirts, and summer shorts.

  Mitch stood staring at the furnished storm cellar, trying to make sense of it.

  He moved around inside of it, and found there was even more than he had first noticed. There was a pile of what looked like rags near the bed, and when he got to the bed, he saw the sheets were deeply stained with some dark color. It could have been anything—a water stain, anything, but Mitch felt he knew what it was: very old, dried blood.

  A noise outside, some animal noise, made him jump nearly out of his skin.

  With one last look around, one sweep of the light, he hurried out.

  He pushed the storm cellar door closed again, leaving the lock to dangle against the rotten wood, and all he could think as he made his way back up
to the house was—what the hell?

  Had his claustrophobic mother furnished it like that so she could fool herself into thinking it wasn’t really a storm cellar if they had to use it? Was she scared of getting caught in it, and so she made sure there was even running water? But that didn’t explain the clothes, or the bed that somebody had actually slept in, much less the blood.

  Maybe it wasn’t blood, he told himself.

  He had no way of really knowing it was blood. Probably he was wrong. Probably it wasn’t.

  It had looked like a goddamned apartment.

  The idea of somebody, anybody, actually staying in the storm cellar for any longer than it took a tornado to pass over gave him the shuddering creeps.

  Having earlier stocked the kitchen with food and drink, Mitch had one beer before he went to bed. As he lay between the clean sheets, he allowed himself to think of Abby for just a moment and to remember how pretty she’d looked that morning on her screened-in porch. Her hair was just as blond and curly as it had ever been, her grin was as open-hearted and infectious as he remembered it, and her voice, calling to Patrick, had sounded just like the girl who used to yell across their lawns at him. Enough, he told himself. He had to tell himself a few more times. The woman is not the girl, he told himself.

  Mitch fell asleep and dreamed of dark and secret places where he didn’t want to go. Because of his dreams, he didn’t sleep long. In the middle of the night, Mitch got up and got dressed again.

  He walked to his car and went for a drive.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  September, 1986

  On Rex’s third trip out to see the girl, Sarah Francis, she invited him into the house.

  Once in, he didn’t know what to do with himself. She made it easier by calling to him to come into the kitchen and offering him a can of beer that she pulled from the refrigerator. He was still underage, but then so was she.

  “Did Pat get some beer for you?” he asked her, attempting to hide his resentment.

  His brother was also too young to buy beer legally, but those sorts of things never seemed to operate in Patrick’s world the way they did in most people’s.

  She nodded. “He left me enough to party for a year, but I can’t drink, and nobody ever comes to see me anyway.” She glanced over, looking surprised, and smiled a little. “Except you.”

  “Why can’t you drink?”

  She shrugged, but didn’t answer him.

  Rex and his friends usually had to struggle to a) find somebody old enough who was also willing to take the chance of getting booze for them, or b) find somebody with a fake ID to do it, and even then there wasn’t anybody local who’d sell it to them if there was a whiff of suspicion that they were the ones who wanted it. Usually it required trips out of town to stock up on cases they could hide where parents would never find them. Pat, on the other hand, seemed to have never-ending supplies of anything he desired, especially girls and alcohol, and he was never inclined to share with his younger brother unless there were serious bribes involved. Once, out of desperation before a field party, Mitch had paid Pat a hundred dollars on top of the price of the keg of beer he obtained for them.

  Rex didn’t know much about alcoholism, but he guessed that considering the family that Sarah came from, that might have something to do with her reluctance to drink alcohol. He decided to be tactful for once in his life and not push her about it.

  “What can you do out here?” he asked her.

  He pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down in it with his cold, sweating beer. He could hardly believe he was there with her, and with a beer in his hand on top of it. He sat back and just enjoyed being able to look at her without having to come up with some kind of excuse for staring.

  She wore the same T-shirt he’d seen her in before, a plain orange cotton one, and again he would have sworn she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. Her shorts were different this time—black ones instead of white. But her legs were just as long and tan, her feet just as bare, her face just as beautiful, her hair just as long and black. It was hot in the house—there was air conditioning, but she didn’t have it on—and she kept lifting her hair up off the back of her neck in an irritated kind of way and draping it over one shoulder. Then when it fell back on her neck again, she’d lift it up again. Rex wanted to go over and lift it for her, hold it on top of her head for her like an Egyptian slave, fan her until she sighed with pleasure, bend over and kiss that sweet, sweaty place on the back of her neck…

  “What?” he asked, having missed whatever it was she had said to him.

  She smiled a little, as if she could read his mind, and then she leaned against the kitchen counter. “I said, I don’t do anything out here. Thank God there’s a TV, and I’ve got some magazines and music. Hey, do you think you could get some books for me?”

  He sat up straighter. “Sure!”

  Then he slouched again, feeling foolish for being so eager.

  “I like romances,” she said, “and mysteries.” She added wistfully, “I wish I could go someplace. I get so bored!”

  “Don’t you get lonely all by yourself out here?”

  She shrugged, but he thought he saw her eyes glisten and her lower lip tremble a little before she heaved a big sigh and said, fervently, “I’d give anything to get out of here for a few hours.”

  “You don’t ever leave? Like, never?”

  Solemnly she shook her head so that her hair swung again and she lifted it again. “Nope. I haven’t left this place at all in a whole month.”

  “How long you gonna have to stay here?”

  She turned, and shaded her eyes and looked out into the sunshine. “A while. ’Til I have enough to make it out there.”

  “Have enough what? Money? How are you going to do that?”

  She turned her head quickly, and looked flustered. “I just meant…I just meant, since I don’t have any expenses, I’m not spending anything. So I get to save a lot. That’s what I meant.”

  He didn’t understand much about it, and didn’t quite have the courage to ask the questions that were piling up inside his head. She couldn’t just stay here forever avoiding her family, could she? Was she waiting until she could get a way out of here, find a job, get some transportation, a job someplace else? But how was any of that going to happen if she never left this house?

  “I could take you someplace,” he blurted.

  “No you can’t. I can’t go anyplace they might see me.”

  He would have asked who “they” were, but he was sure he already knew: her family.

  “I don’t mean a place, exactly,” Rex said. “I just mean, I could take you for a drive.”

  “A drive?” She looked at him as if he’d spoken a foreign word she didn’t comprehend. “You mean, like—”

  He grinned. “Like a drive. In my truck. Just drive around, you know?”

  “Drive around…where?”

  “I don’t know, out of town, maybe, where nobody knows you.”

  “No.” She shook her head violently. “No, no. I can’t. I can’t be seen.”

  “I don’t mean in the daytime. At night. And not early in the night, either. I mean, like, really late?” He laughed a little, because it sounded like fun. “We could do it, like, after midnight. And we could just drive around with the windows open so you could feel the breeze and, I don’t know, just get out of here for a little while.”

  When she looked at him then, he saw a hopeful, mischievous glint in her eyes.

  “It would have to be really late,” she said slowly.

  He liked that idea. In fact, he loved that idea. “Sure!”

  In an instant, a whole fantasy ran through Rex’s mind. He saw himself making an excuse to his parents to be somewhere else that night, hiding his car, maybe even sleeping in it until it was time to pick her up. He imagined himself driving to pick her up under a romantic full moon. No, on second thought, that would reveal too much. It should be dark and cloudy. He saw her waiting eagerly f
or him to arrive, running out of the house to hop into the car with him. He could feel how the bench seat on his truck would sink down a little with her weight, though just a little. He could sense the presence of her body next to him, smell the clean soapy fragrance that trailed behind her when she moved. He could see her eyes shining in the dark cab of the truck, see her teeth when she grinned like a conspirator at him, see her eyes widen when she looked at him in that dim light and realized that he was sexier than she had ever realized, that he was more mature than his older brother…

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking suddenly doubtful and frightened.

  He didn’t want to frighten her. He didn’t want to make her unhappy at all, about anything, ever.

  “Okay,” he said, temporarily giving up. “Whatever you think.”

  She looked both disappointed and grateful that he was dropping it. But he wasn’t, not really. Rex figured this was an argument he was bound to win eventually, because nobody sane, not even somebody with a good reason for hiding, could possibly stand being cooped up in one place for very long. Eventually she was going to go so stir-crazy that she’d practically beg him to take her for that drive.

  He was surprised how long she held out.

  It took another three weeks of irregular visits—and magazines and beauty stuff and feminine products and groceries—before she finally greeted him at the door one night with, “I can’t take this anymore! You’ve got to get me out of here. Let’s go for that drive you talked about! Do you promise me that nobody I know will see us? Do you swear?”

  As if I have control over her universe, he thought, pleased that she was giving him that much power. He felt so turned on that he could barely walk into the house to put down the sack of goodies he had brought to her.