The Virgin of Small Plains

  Even though they were only standing against counters in the kitchen, it felt as if they were warily circling each other, Mitch thought. They were both getting used to the idea that they were brothers.

  The kid was almost scarily blunt, it turned out.

  “You’re Jeff?” Mitch had asked him in the storm cellar.

  “Yeah, who the fuck are you?”

  “I guess I’m your brother,” Mitch told him. “I’m Mitch.”

  “No shit” was the kid’s response, accompanied by an unreadable look. “Got any beer?”

  Now, in the kitchen, each of them with a can in their hands, Jeff Newquist said to Mitch Newquist, “Where the hell you been for seventeen years?”

  “College,” Mitch answered, deciding a literal answer was the safest one for the moment, “then Chicago. Denver. I’ve been in Kansas City the rest of the time.”

  “So why didn’t you ever come back?”

  Mitch detected no pain in the question, or at least he didn’t think he did. He would have sworn that he saw and heard only a kind of hard curiosity. Nevertheless, he deflected it with his own question. “What have they told you about me?”

  “Ma and Pa?”

  Mitch started. “Ma and Pa?” Incredulously, he said, “You call them Ma and Pa?”

  A glimmer of what looked like hateful humor suddenly appeared on the boy’s sharp-featured face. “When I was little, she wanted me to call her Mama.” He put the accent flutingly on the last syllable, making it sound French. “I changed it to Ma just to piss her off.”

  “That would do it,” Mitch said, and started to laugh.

  The boy looked surprised, and then he looked secretly pleased.

  “So what did they say about why I left?” Mitch asked him.

  Jeff shrugged. “You got in some trouble. It was best that you leave town.” Again, he spoke in a flutingly false tone, clearly imitating the elevated way their mother and father spoke. “It was best that you not return.”

  Mitch snorted. “I got into some trouble?”

  The boy raised his eyebrows. “You saying you didn’t?”

  “I’m saying it wasn’t my fault.”

  That elicited a snort from the boy. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

  Mitch felt a warming to this boy.

  “Did they tell you what kind of trouble I was supposed to have gotten into?”

  “They never did, but everybody else has. Some people thought you might have killed somebody, that girl in the cemetery…”

  “Jesus,” Mitch breathed. “People really thought that?”

  “Not really. I don’t know. Nobody really knows. You know what they call me?”

  Mitch blinked at the sudden change of tack. “Who?”

  “People.”

  “No. What do they call you?”

  “The Substitute Son. How you like that?”

  Mitch was appalled for the boy’s sake. “That’s shitty, Jeff. It sucks.”

  Again, the boy looked pleased. Again, he seemed not to take very personally any part of what he was saying or hearing.

  “What’s it been like for you,” Mitch asked, “growing up with them?”

  That produced another shrug. “Livin’ with old folks. They’re old, all their friends are old. It’s like this huge generation gap.”

  It was true, Mitch thought. His parents had been in their thirties, as their best friends had been, when they’d raised him. But they’d been in their forties when they’d adopted this boy. That might not have seemed such a large gap, but Nadine and the judge had always seemed older than their age anyway.

  “You feel like you were raised by grandparents?” Mitch asked him.

  “I guess.” For the first time, the kid seemed to hesitate. “So what was it like for you? Being their kid. Back in the day.”

  Mitch didn’t hesitate. “They weren’t much fun,” he said with wry understatement. “But I liked their friends…” He smiled a little. “…who weren’t so old back then. I was close to the Reynoldses and the Shellenbergers…” He paused, to see if the kid would take up that subject in any way.

  Jeff didn’t show any interest. Maybe he wasn’t close to those families, Mitch thought, since they didn’t have kids his age.

  “Where’d you get the bird?”

  “Brought him with me,” Mitch lied.

  The boy gave him an amused squinty glance that slightly unnerved Mitch. The look suggested that Jeff knew he was lying, but how could he?

  “Looks like Abby Reynolds’s bird to me.”

  “Abby’s? She has a…doesn’t she have a smaller bird?”

  “Well, yeah, she had two smaller ones and also a big parrot like this one, only it got lost in that storm. She’s got notices up all over town, didn’t you see them?”

  “No.” Mitch stared over at J.D., who had cocked his red head and was giving them the eye. His father had claimed that somebody had stolen the bird, but Mitch hadn’t believed it. He thought that one of his parents had left the door open and allowed the bird to fly away because they didn’t want to be bothered. Was it possible that somebody had stolen J.D. and that that somebody was Abby? He looked back at Jeff and said firmly, “This is my bird.”

  “Whatever.”

  It was strange, but now and then an expression crossed the boy’s face that reminded Mitch of either Nadine or the judge. He knew that people who lived together for a long time could end up looking like each other, but it was still kind of amazing to see the right side of the kid’s mouth quirk down in a disparaging fashion, like the judge’s did, or to see him raise those eyebrows as Nadine used to do when she was confronted by information she could scarcely credit.

  “Why’d you come back?” he asked Mitch.

  There was a definite challenge in the question. For the first time Mitch thought he heard something personal in it. Maybe it was only his imagination, but he thought he was hearing, beneath the actual words, How come you couldn’t come back to see your brother for seventeen fucking years, but you come back now? Or maybe, Mitch thought wryly, it was more like, Who the hell you think you are to come fuck with my inheritance after all these years?

  In that moment, Mitch realized something, and decided to tell the truth about it.

  “I don’t think I ever got it,” he said.

  “Got what?”

  “That I have a brother.”

  Something passed through the boy’s eyes, some flicker of surprise and emotion that could have been anything, but that Mitch read as resentment and hurt. He knew he was right when Jeff said, “How the fuck could you not understand you had a brother?” The cold and angry tone reminded Mitch, creepily, of their late mother, though the language did not. Evidently, Jeff had picked up from Nadine and the judge their kind of cold anger, as opposed to the kind of hot anger that Mitch had always considered to be more honest. Whenever he heard that same kind of cold tone coming out of his own mouth, he hated it, even when he couldn’t stop it.

  Mitch took a long moment to answer, not wanting to bullshit the kid.

  “I was…jealous,” he finally said. “I was young. I’d been kicked out. I’d lost my home, my family, all my friends. I didn’t even get to graduate with my class. I was a mess. I was alone, I felt falsely accused of something, my parents seemed cold as ice. And then they introduced you into the scene. You were total news to me. I didn’t even know they had ever wanted to adopt. I didn’t know they wanted any more kids. I couldn’t have been more shocked if they had told me they had adopted an alien baby. If you were the substitute son, then I guess I felt like the forgotten son.” He stopped, to think it through some more. “I didn’t blame you. I blamed them. They were so fucking cold the way they did everything. I felt like they had decided I was too much trouble to bother with anymore. I felt like they threw me out and cut me off, so I cut them off.”

  The kid looked down at the kitchen floor. When he raised his face it was devoid of any expression that might give away any of his feelings. “Got any mor
e beer?”

  “No.” He did have more—and if Jeff had seen the inside of the refrigerator he knew it—but Mitch wasn’t going to encourage the seventeen-year-old to drink more. He suspected the kid already did plenty of that. “You want to stay here? You want the other bed?”

  The kid shrugged, without saying yes or no.

  “What’s with the fancy storm cellar?” Mitch asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why is it all fixed up like an apartment?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Dunno. First time I ever saw the inside of it.”

  “Really? How’d you get here, Jeff? I didn’t see a car.”

  “I parked behind the house.”

  “Why’d you come out here?”

  The boy hesitated, then shrugged again. “I was curious. Dad told me you were here so I came out to see what you look like. But you weren’t here. So I saw the lock on the storm cellar was broken and I went over and that’s when I saw it was, like, furnished. I decided to sack out until you got back.”

  “Why’d you leave the door open?”

  “Are you kidding me? You think I want to get shut in there?”

  “Yeah.” Mitch knew what he meant. The storm cellar raised all kinds of primitive fears in him, too. It was the kind of place that made imaginations run wild…what if a person couldn’t get out, what if nobody ever found them, what if…

  “You have school tomorrow?”

  Jeff shook his head. “I’m done.”

  “Graduated?”

  “Next year.”

  “You got a job?”

  A self-satisfied smirk appeared on the kid’s face. “I did. Until this afternoon.”

  “What happened?” Mitch decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and then was surprised by the answer. “You quit?”

  “Yeah, told them to shove it.”

  “What are you going to do for money? Unless the judge has changed a lot since I was your age, you’re not getting any cash that you can’t earn.”

  “I sold something,” Jeff said, looking down and smiling to himself.

  “Come on,” Mitch said, when there was no further information coming. “We’ll find you some sheets.”

  “No, I’m going back to sleep in that other place.”

  “In the cellar? You are? But you could stay here—”

  ”I like it there,” he claimed.

  Mitch let it go. He even felt relieved. This was new to both of them. Maybe they both required some separation. Feeling a wave of guilt, Mitch thought, After all, it’s what we’re both used to. The thought of separation made him think of his own son, and he felt a sudden deep longing to see Jimmy. Having his own child and experiencing powerful love for him had made Mitch even more incredulous that a father could ever abandon his son the way Mitch felt his own father had abandoned him, no matter what the excuse.

  He would never do such a thing to Jimmy.

  “Take some food with you,” Mitch suggested to his brother.

  He left the kitchen to do some things for J.D.—and so the kid wouldn’t feel self-conscious about taking what he wanted.

  After Jeff had gone to the storm cellar with a full grocery sack, Mitch returned to the kitchen to see what had appealed to the teenager. A loaf of bread was gone, along with a package of sliced turkey, a bottle of mayo, one of the six-packs of beer…and their father’s black-and-silver pistol.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  At the edge of the town of Franklin, Kansas, Patrick Shellenberger slowed his truck down to call to a couple of teenage boys standing in a yard. One of them was holding a cigarette down by his right knee. They weren’t doing anything, just standing there. Patrick remembered that stance, that frustrating bored feeling of standing around with nothing to do. At that age, he’d had about five minutes’ tolerance for it before he split and found something, anything, to do instead—the “anything” usually involving girls, beer, or a game of pool, or all three. These two would have to drive many miles to find a pool table, and they’d be lucky to get any beer. If there were any girls left in Franklin, Patrick would be surprised, and even if there were, those girls would have to be desperate to give these two a chance.

  “Hey!” he called to them. “Does the Francis family still live around here?”

  The boys, tall, skinny, looked at each other before staring back at him.

  They didn’t move, or walk over to where he had his truck in idle.

  “They’re gone,” one of the boys called back to him.

  “Except the one brother that’s in jail,” the other one drawled. Patrick doubted they had a two-digit IQ between them. He asked them, “There’s a brother in jail?”

  “Yeah,” they both said.

  “Which one?”

  The shorter boy shrugged. “One of ’em.”

  “What’d he go to jail for?”

  They looked at each other, laughed, and the second one said, “Drunk, I ’spect.”

  “What jail’s he in?”

  “County,” the first one said.

  “This county?” Patrick asked, with exaggerated patience.

  “Naw, he’s in jail over in Small Plains.”

  Apparently, it either didn’t occur to them to ask why he wanted to know, or else they didn’t care.

  “Cool truck,” one of them observed.

  “Bitchin’,” the other one echoed.

  Patrick thought he had not heard the word “bitchin’” since he was in high school, and even then it had been several decades past its prime. He turned and raised himself up in the seat so he could reach over and get something from the floor behind him. Then, looking back at them, he said, “Come here.”

  They wandered over until they got close enough to see what he was holding out the window and offering to them.

  “You givin’ that to us?” the taller one asked him, looking astonished.

  Now that they were within a few feet of him, he saw they were younger than he’d originally thought, maybe fourteen or fifteen.

  “Take the whole thing,” Patrick said.

  The other one grabbed the six pack, and muttered, “Cool. Thanks, mister.”

  Patrick left them as he had found them, standing like scrawny statues in the dark, only now they had something to do. They could pop open beer cans. Whoopee. He would have bet any amount of money that they’d find a corner under some dark bushes and drain all the beers, one after another. Tomorrow morning, they might not remember what he had asked them or what they had told him. Even if they claimed to remember, nobody would trust the word of underage boys who got themselves drunk.

  Patrick turned his truck around to head back toward Small Plains.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late to knock on Abby’s door.

  And there were two fewer birds to shit in his boots now.

  Patrick smiled as he lifted a cup of coffee from a cup holder to his lips. The sunglasses had been a close call, but he had covered it well, judging by Abby’s reaction. She seemed to have bought it hook, line, and sinker, just as she had believed his story about going to Emporia tonight.

  What’s in it for you, Patrick?

  That’s what she had asked him the day of the tornado. What was in it for him to marry her? Everything. His future. The rest of his life, although she wasn’t the only part of the equation he was putting together.

  Someday his dad would die. Maybe not all that long from now, even though he seemed to be feeling better at the moment. If his mom is still living, she’ll need to turn the ranch over to her sons to run, and Patrick wanted to be in a position where anybody—even Rex—could see that it deserved to be him, because he was the one who’d been running it. If his dad went last, after his mom, Patrick wanted the old man to stipulate that he was to run the ranch.

  He had no other future, he knew that.

  There was nothing else he could do that would give him anything like the access to land and cash the ranch could give him. He needed to look—he needed to be—respectable, acceptable
, for as long as it took to get firmly in control so that then he could do what he wanted to do with the land. Sell it to wind farms, maybe. Lease it to other ranchers. Open it up to oil and gas exploration. Whatever allowed him to take the money and run.

  Abby was a necessary ingredient.

  His parents already loved her; to them, she’d be the perfect daughter-in-law. His brother would have to come around, for Abby’s sake. The town would figure that any man Abby Reynolds married must, at heart, be all right.

  Patrick needed to be that man.

  And he didn’t need or want the complication of her fucking long-lost love.

  Having satisfactorily completed step one in his plan to get rid of Mitch Newquist without actually having to kill the son of a bitch, Patrick was ready to move on to step two.

  Rex made his last calls of the night to check on his department before getting ready to fix his late supper alone in his small house out in the country near his parents’ place: one call to the dispatcher, one to each of his deputies on duty, and a last one to the county jail. It was a lightly staffed department in a lightly populated county. He could be as hands-on as he pleased, even when it didn’t always please them.

  There was nothing particularly interesting to hear until he reached the jail.

  “Had a visitor just now, Sheriff,” the night deputy informed him.

  “This late? Who the hell was it and who did they want to see?”

  “Well, it was your brother. And he wanted to see Marty Francis.”

  Sarah’s brother. Once he got over the initial instant of shock, Rex felt a slow burn start to rise up his esophagus. “He say why?”

  “Nope, but I told him he was too late, ’cause Marty got out today, but that if he waited long enough he’d probably catch him on the rebound.” The deputy’s laugh was a deep, fruity, cynical sound.

  “Your prisoner say where he was going when he left?”

  “Get a drink he said, damn fool.”

  “Does he still live in Franklin?”

  “Dunno, Sheriff. Want me to find out for you?”

  “Yeah. Call me back. Wait! What did my brother say when you told him that Marty was gone?”

  “What’d he say?” the deputy repeated, clearly stalling for time while he tried to remember. “I think he said, well, you can’t say I didn’t try, or something like that. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”