by Kris Ashton
The phone beside Hank’s temporary bed started to ring. Hank did not wake up, even though it rang eighteen times. About fifteen seconds after it stopped the first time, the phone rang again, its shrill bell crying out twenty times before it fell silent. Hank still did not stir.
Digger O’Malley hefted the last hay bale onto the back of his utility, dusted off his hands and jumped in behind the wheel. Some of the old truck’s panels were so badly rusted they had peepholes and couldn’t go more than thirty miles an hour flat chat, but none of that mattered since it never left Digger’s sixty-acre property.
“Right?” he shouted to Cam, a kid from Darlington who had spent the past two summers as a hired hand on Digger’s farm.
“Yup,” Cam called back.
Digger drove the truck out of the barn and onto the pastures, where a mix of dairy and beef cattle grazed and reposed. Hearing the truck’s approach, they roused themselves and lumbered toward it. Every hundred feet or so Cam tossed out a bale and the cattle fell to it with slobbery bovine relish. Some farmers didn’t bother with high-grade food, which, in Digger’s opinion, was why they mostly lived hand-to-mouth and spent their evenings in an armchair bitching to their wives (or down at the Eagle Eye bitching to one another). Produce buyers weren’t stupid; they could tell the difference between a cow that had lived on nothing but grass and one that had been fed a variety of hay, grass and grain. A farmer might lose a few bucks keeping his livestock in good condition, but he could make that back double or triple selling to the suppliers of fancy restaurants instead of backwater butchers. Same went for dairy—what you shelled out in food you got back in quality and quantity of milk. Some sorry bastards were too stupid to see that, though. They spent too much time in the fields and not enough adding up figures. Farming was a business, unless you planned to eat the produce yourself.
Digger drove to the northern corner of his property to look for wanderers. Here his fields ran parallel with Main Street, and as Digger drove past he noticed one of the wooden fence posts had been knocked over, dragging the two nearest posts down with it.
“Goddamn it all!” Digger said. He put the truck in park and got out to inspect the damage. Luckily the hit post had not been broken and most of the fence wire appeared intact, even if it was stretched and bent out of shape.
“You reckon a cow did that?” Cam said, walking over.
Digger planted his hands on his hips and turned on him. “I don’t know why you’re saving for college—unless it’s dumb-ass college,” he said. “The fence is bowed in this way, right? You think a couple of cows hopped over it and pushed it back in?”
“Oh, yeah,” Cam said, laughing at himself.
“No, I’ll wager some drunken asshole veered off the road and knocked it down. Happens now and again. A couple of years back Terry Burns had to replace about fifty feet of fence when some half-bright tourist swerved to avoid a raccoon.”
“We going to fix it now?”
“No, I thought I’d let some cattle walk out onto the road first. Of course we’re going to fix it now. No, scratch that, I’m going to fix it now. You’re going to walk back and get started on the milking.”
“Can’t I drive the truck?” asked Cam. It would be another six months before he could get his learner’s permit and he enjoyed puttering the truck around the farm.
“What, and leave me to walk all the way back when I’m dying of thirst and half starving? I don’t think so. Now off you go. And before you get onto the milking, tell Mrs O’Malley to fix us some baloney sandwiches for lunch.”
“Okay, sir.”
Digger watched Cam start away down the gentle slope of the field and then turned back to the fence, wiggling the post in its hole and checking the wire more thoroughly to make sure it had not snapped anywhere. He figured he could effect a stopgap solution with a shovel and a pair of pliers, both of which he kept in the truck. He could come back next week and fix it properly when he didn’t have a thousand other things to do.
He climbed onto the back of the utility and slid the hefty toolbox and the shovel to the edge of the flatbed tray. Then he got down and lugged them over to the fence.
First he dug a hole to provide a supply of fresh earth, then he stood the post up straight and filled in the area around its base with handfuls of soil. When that was done he tamped the soil down with his boot and started on the other two posts.
He was using pliers to twist and tighten the wire when he saw someone walking towards him. Cars passed by in their dozens during daylight hours, but a pedestrian out here was an unusual sight. Digger snipped off some excess wire and looked up.
She was a sweet little thing—pretty face, long hair, quite a chest on her. Judging by her clothes, Digger decided she must be one of those hippies living up on the old Jenkins property. He didn’t much care for hippies, especially the men with their faggoty hair, but the girls from the commune (those he’d seen, anyway) were all easy to look at.
“Strange place to be out walking,” Digger said, flashing her a smile.
The girl looked at him and Digger knew right away she was stoned out of her gourd. He and his wife had tried wacky tabaccky once before they were married, and he remembered Nancy’s eyes being just the same—listless, confused, somewhere between waking and sleeping, there and not.
The girl came right up to the fence and put her hand on his arm. “Make love to me,” she said.
Digger checked over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a gaggle of jokesters in on the prank, but there was only grass and a couple of cows.
Hot treacle filled his stomach. “Damn, I knew you hippies were supposed to be free and easy and all that, but I didn’t know you were…I mean, I didn’t think…”
“Make love to me,” the girl said again. Her voice had a note of emergency in it this time, like she expected her nether regions to burst if they didn’t get the prescribed attention. Her hand felt hot on his arm, almost burning.
Burning with desire, Digger thought. He could empathize.
He licked his lips and looked both ways along Main Street, but it had fallen quiet.
“Okay, darlin’, come on over here.”
She threw one leg over the top strand of wire and Digger got a full view of her thigh, right up to the place where married men weren’t meant to see unless they were at a stag party or something. He lifted her up—she was heavier than she looked—so her weight wouldn’t buckle the fence. When she was on his side he took her by the hand and led her away to the eastern side of the property, where he had left a stand of bushy trees and shrubs for the cows to shade in on hot days. Digger picked a spot screened off from the road and pressed the hippie girl up against a tree trunk.
“Now you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “I don’t want you getting halfway through and changing your mind and screaming rape or something.”
The girl grabbed at his belt buckle, wiggling it loose. A piranha ravenousness had entered her eyes. Digger knew this ravenousness himself, but had never seen it scrawled across Nancy’s (or any other girl’s) face before.
“Make love to me,” she said through gritted teeth.
Digger giggled in disbelief. “You want it bad, don’t you honey?”
She posed no reply, save to strip him naked from the waist down. When she stood back up, Digger unwrapped her ample breasts and was delighted to find no brassiere.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said in short breaths. “I’m a married man.”
The girl slid off her own underwear and straddled him. Digger groaned and thought just for a moment he might faint with pleasure.
“But I am only human,” he gasped.
“Don’t run too far ahead!” Tina Radford called ahead to her daughter.
“Okay,” Jessica shouted back, paying no notice.
As Tina watched her daughter canter along with their Labrador, Rufus, she could not feel angry. It had been just over two years since Chuck walked out on them and disappeared somewhere—to the
navy, his sister thought, but she was only guessing. Happiness had not been a big part of Tina and Jessica’s life since that day. In a bigger city they might have fared better, but in Bald Eagle most every married woman assumed Chuck had walked out for a good reason—and although Tina wasn’t supposed to know this, they speculated about what that might have been. The truth was Chuck had only married Tina under pressure from both their fathers, after she had announced the tiny miracle growing inside her. ‘Shotgun’ hardly described their nuptials; it felt more like being fired out of cannon and landing someplace they didn’t want to be. Chuck’s lousy trucker’s wage could not pay for a house in Denver, so they had bought some cheap land out the back of nowhere in particular and set about trying to build a life and a house to shelter it. The house ended up sturdy enough, but the life never really got past the framework stage, with Chuck working five days a week and absent with booze the remaining two.
Tina wondered sometimes how they had stuck it out the six years they did. She supposed they had both felt trapped—she financially and emotionally, he by the expectations of family and a young man’s unfulfilled dreams.
Whatever the case, he had left for work on a Friday morning and never returned, leaving not so much as a note. He had called his sister about three months after his departure to give her the navy story, which she then passed on to Tina.
What Chuck had left his wife was a house, a car, a whole heap of unpaid bills, and an empty joint bank account (which she had foolishly agreed could be accessed with only one signature). Thus, she had precisely eight hundred and ninety dollars in her own account with which to cover all these expenses…and no source of income.
The first year had been the roughest—initially selling and hocking whatever she could while she searched in vain for a job, then finally living off food stamps and fending off inquiries from both debt collectors and local men who thought she’d snap up a marriage proposal like a starving dog. Things had indeed seemed grim, and she had planned to move in with her parents (despite the certainty they would make her life just as bad, only in a different way) if the situation had gone from impecuniousness to outright destitution.
But then Mort Camber had hired her to work the checkout at his small market and she had begun the slow, uphill journey toward a normal life again. One by one she had paid off her creditors (sweet talking extensions out of a few—something she could probably never have done had she been in closer proximity to them) to the point where her finances became manageable. She and Jessica never ate out, went to see a movie or made trips into Denver, but they lived okay now. For the first time in two Christmases, Tina could afford to buy her daughter a present—just a doll, nothing flash, but a present nonetheless. And Tina had always found reason to be thankful for a daughter, who never grizzled or complained, even after they sold the television to pay an electricity bill.
Back in January, Tina and Jessica had been in the town center to make their weekly shop when the butcher, Aaron Wiseman, asked Jessica if she liked dogs. Jessica nodded enthusiastically.
“Well, you see my bitch Honey just had a litter of pups. Cutest things you’ve ever seen, but I can’t afford to keep all of them. What do you think, Mom? Would you and Jessica here like to take one?”
“Oh, please, Mommy, please!” Jessica squealed, jumping up and down.
Tina had given Aaron a surreptitious glare and then said, “Gee, sweetie, I’m not sure we can afford a pet.”
“Oh, please! I’ll…I’ll get a job. I’ll do anything. Please can we get a puppy?”
“Now, I don’t think it’ll have to come to that,” Aaron said, smiling over the counter. “How about from now on when you call in here each week, I throw in a bag of off-cuts? No extra charge.”
“That’s very kind of you, Aaron, but we couldn’t,” Tina said, accustomed to deflecting men’s charity. “It’s too much to—”
“Garbage, we’ll be doing one another a favor. Right now I’m forever tripping over Labrador puppies—”
“Labradors!” Jessica said, breathless.
“—and cleaning up their messes. The way I see it, you’ll be taking one off my hands and helping me get my life back to normal. So is it a deal?”
“Oh, all right,” Tina had said, rolling her eyes to Aaron’s deep-throated cheers and Tina’s ecstatic shrieks.
So now when Jessica and Rufus pounded along the track and disappeared around a short bend, Tina could only smile. Mort gave her Fridays off so she could work the busy Saturday mornings for him. Friday had become her favorite day of the week. She, Jessica and Rufus often went walking like this on one of Bald Eagle’s innumerable winding trails that had been cleared for some lost purpose and had no apparent destination. Other times they went fishing down at the river (when Tina could stretch the budget to include a packet of worms) and Rufus would nose through the estuary rocks and grassy banks while she and Jessica talked.
Inhaling the clean air and keeping a swift, steady pace, Tina felt as fit as she had since high school. Their walks had performed a kind of restorative magic, diminishing the last of the fat around her buttocks (which had stubbornly remained there since Jessica’s birth) and bolstering her self-confidence. She felt like a person again, even though the local gossips had tried to flay her to the bone with their speculating tongues. She, Tina Radford, had got her head above water again with no help from anyone.
Rufus started to bark—an anxious, excited bark with an edge of aggression to it, Tina thought. She broke into a trot to catch up, her thick hiking boots crunching up the stony earth.
When Jessica came into sight, Tina saw she was down on her haunches looking at something on the edge of the track. Rufus stood beside her looking at the same thing, his hind end wheeling around as if it wanted to head in another direction.
“Shush, Rufus!” Jessica said.
As Tina closed the final few feet between them, she could see what had caught her daughter’s attention. It appeared to be an oversized pinball melted and drawn out at one end. Tina tried to imagine what it might belong to, what set of circumstances would see something so manufactured dropped out here in the semi-wilderness, and couldn’t.
Before she could say not to, Jessica had taken the object in the palm of her hand.
“You shouldn’t just pick things up off the ground, Jessica. You don’t know where they’ve been.”
“What do you think it is?” Jessica said, holding it out to her.
Tina examined the object closely. Its reflective surface was as polished as a mirror in a ritzy hotel. “I don’t know, hon.”
“Do you think it could be worth something? Could we sell it?”
“It doesn’t belong to us,” Tina said. “We’d have to turn it in to Sheriff Grayson first to see if anyone lost it.”
“But if no one came to get it, we could sell it then, couldn’t we?”
“I suppose so.”
Tina took the pinball object from her daughter and then dropped it with a sharp yelp. “Son of a bitch!” she said, shaking her stinging hand. A small prick of blood wept to the surface of her middle finger.
“You said a bad word,” Jessica scolded.
Janet didn’t need to ask where the middle-aged couple was from—their clothes might as well have been orange jumpsuits with PROPERTY OF CALIFORNIA stenciled across the back.
“We’re driving across the country,” the man said, leaning one hand on the counter, “thought we’d tour the nation’s capital and maybe spend some time up in Maine. I hear it’s pretty this time of year.”
His wife, rotating a rack of postcards said, “Don’t forget Florida.”
“Yeah, Darlene here wants to check out Florida—thinks it might be a nice place to retire someday. Can’t understand it, myself. Just sounds like Huntington Beach with more flies and alligators and hurricanes.”
“Just like California’s only home to surfers and bodybuilders,” Darlene said without diverting her attention from the rack.
“Bald Eagle is wor
th a look, if you have the time,” Janet said. “We have a beautiful stream that runs through the forest just north of here and you can always reel in a catfish or two.”
“I love fishing, but Darlene won’t go with me.”
“I’d sooner sit and watch paint dry,” she said, squeaking the rack around half a turn.
“You’ll find a nice hotel up the road if you decide you want to spend the night,” Janet offered.
“Well—”
“No, Horace! We need to make another hundred miles before dinner if we plan to keep to our schedule.” Darlene came toward the register brandishing a postcard and shoved in beside her husband. “If it were up to him we’d still be fiddling around in Las Vegas.”
“And if it were up to you, we’d never see—”
“Oh, Horace, don’t argue with me in public. I’m sorry—he has no manners. He must have been brought up in a zoo.”
Horace mouthed something that his wife couldn’t see. Janet thought it might have been, I’ll put you in a zoo. She tried not to laugh as she made change of a quarter.
“Nice to meet you both, anyway.”
“And you,” Horace said. He seemed reluctant to leave, but Darlene led him out by the elbow. They exchanged fierce whispers on the way out.
People had thought Janet insane when she opened a tourist shop, claiming the town had nothing to make a tourist want a memento. But tourists didn’t much need a reason; just being on vacation primed them to buy—and buy any old junk at that. A postcard here, a T-shirt there, it soon added up. Janet had a feeling that if those same townspeople got a look at the balance in her bankbook, their eyes would start from their sockets.