by April Smith
“It was years ago!”
“You know how I feel about these things,” said Leon.
“I sure do now,” said Marja, standing up. “And it’s quite a revelation.”
“Please don’t fight about me,” Betsy told them.
Jo was huddled on the couch. Betsy sat down and gently put an arm around her, but the girl pulled away.
“Well,” said Leon, “if it isn’t the Red queen.”
“How much have you had to drink?” Cal asked.
“What do you care?”
“Watch how you talk to my wife,” he warned.
“It doesn’t matter what Leon says,” Marja declared dramatically from the middle of the room. “I was there. I lived through it. Our father threw her out of the house because of her principles. When she got out of jail, she had no place to go.”
Jo turned big, troubled eyes toward her mother. “Where did you go?” she whispered.
“I was fine,” Betsy assured her. “I stayed with friends from the union.”
“I hope you’re not turning out to be like my father,” Marja told her husband.
“Don’t be absurd,” Leon said.
“He was a monster. He got between us,” Marja said, voice breaking. She turned to Betsy. “He turned me against you. I never wanted you to leave New York.”
“I never wanted to leave you with him.”
“I’m sorry,” said Marja.
“I’m sorry, too.”
Betsy stood and held her sister in a hard embrace.
“It’s all because she had ideals,” Marja sniffled. “I should have stood by her.”
“Mom?” asked Jo in a small voice. “Are you really a Communist?”
“Not anymore, and it wasn’t what you think. Not like what that movie said, or the McCarthy hearings on TV.”
“What was it, then?”
“More of a social club. We had dances,” Betsy said, almost desperately. “You went there to meet men. There was the charitable side, that’s why I joined. It was the Depression, you know. We worked in soup kitchens. We helped the poor. We weren’t trying to bring down society—it was just the opposite. We wanted fair wages for working people. We believed in a better world, that’s why.”
“Don’t listen to that bologna,” Leon told Jo. “Your mother took a secret oath pledging to defend the Soviet Union.”
“I did not!” Betsy spat.
Jo shut her eyes and clenched her fists. “Stop it! Why is everybody going crazy?”
“Leave her alone,” said Marja. “She’s an innocent child.”
“She needs to know the truth. That’s what they do in the Communist Party,” Leon insisted. “They pledge allegiance to Moscow. It’s a fact.”
“I never took any kind of oath and I don’t know anyone who did,” Betsy replied heatedly.
Jo looked questioningly at Cal. “Did she, Dad?”
Leon shot Cal a challenging look, calculated to trigger a tirade, but Cal put on the brakes. It was Leon’s indifference to the torment he was causing Jo, by pitting the girl against her parents, that made Cal pull back and do everything in his power to stay rational and calm everyone down.
“No, honey, your mother did not. She just decided that she’d had enough,” Cal said, then turned to his brother-in-law. “Nobody’s hiding anything, Leon. The FBI didn’t even ask. You’re making this into something it’s not. And by the way, if they do ask, we’ll tell the truth. Yes, she joined, but it was a youthful mistake.”
“Yes, but it’s better for everyone if it never comes up,” Marja added nervously.
“Because people are sheep,” Betsy said. “Frightened little lambs.”
Jo said, “I don’t understand. They showed a movie in school that said Russians are horrible, filthy people. How could you be like them?”
“I’m not like them,” Betsy said. “That movie is propaganda. It isn’t true.”
“You mean the school is lying?”
“Can you please explain this to her?” Betsy asked Cal, finally exhausted.
“People lie when they have something to gain,” Cal said. “The Red Scare was the result of politicians wanting power. Fear is very powerful. It makes people build missiles and start wars.”
“Why?”
“Because you can make a lot of money from missiles and wars. This is exactly the mind-set that your mother and I wanted to get away from back east, and I’m going to fight to the finish to stop it from happening here.”
Leon sat down next to poor Jo, placing her squarely between himself and her mother: between New York and freedom, and the prison of home. Then he spoke quietly, as if for her ears only. “It’s all very well to have high ideals, but what about the consequences? You see, now that the FBI was here, and they know who I am, they also know that I’m associated with a Communist. Okay, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt—a former Communist. What if my colleagues in New York find out? The hospital? My patients? Your parents’ noble principles could affect my livelihood.”
Jo looked at her father questioningly, and Cal could barely restrain himself from grabbing the ophthalmologist by the throat.
“Everything comes down to what’s best for Leon,” he said harshly. “What are you so afraid of that your colleagues will find out? Could it be that you’re such a coward that you have to put a little girl between you and a fair fight?”
Leon stood. “We’re leaving right now,” he told Marja. “Find out when the first train leaves for San Francisco.”
“Find out yourself,” said Marja.
Jo was looking back and forth between the adults. Her eyes were wild with disbelief. “Does this mean I can’t go to New York?” she cried.
Just like that her future was shattered.
“We’ll talk about it later—” Betsy began.
Sobbing, Jo flew off the couch and slammed the door to her room. They could hear desolate crying all night. In the morning, when Marja and Leon were loading their bags into the station wagon, her inflamed cheeks were still wet with streaks of grief.
Taking pity on her niece, Marja ushered Jo around the side of the house and held her against her bosom until the very last moment before they had to depart.
“Why can’t I come with you?” Jo moaned.
“I have to go with my husband now.”
“Why can’t I come, too? He doesn’t like me because of Mom?”
“Of course he likes you. He loves you. You’re a lovely girl. None of this has anything to do with you. You’ll visit very soon, I promise.”
“I hate it here. I’ll run away!”
“And I’ll put you right back on the train,” Marja replied affectionately. “Stay and help your parents. They love you very much.”
“I can’t go to New York!” Jo raged. “I’m stuck here because of something that happened before I was born!”
“That’s usually the way it is,” Marja said, releasing her. “You’ll have your chance. Come on now, be a big girl. Let me go and catch the train.”
Jo couldn’t bring herself to watch the station wagon pull out, taking away the one person who understood her. She couldn’t bear to see her mother’s strained and angry face at the wheel. She turned around and went into the house and called Robbie Fletcher.
“Meet me at the Spooky Place,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Everything.”
—
She got on Sprite and rode bareback through the yard, across the stream, and toward the pasture. Instead of taking the trail up to Bottlebrush Creek, she took the dirt road going east. A quarter of a mile from the farmstead it widened to bald clay flats, and she came to the marker, an old tire with a block of salt inside for the cattle. Ahead of her the view was nothing but sameness: russet-colored grass along a wire fence she’d fixed a hundred times; the prairie should have been green this time of year. The wide-open sky, well, right now it was pretty plain, dark blue fading to turquoise along the bottom, a row of high-up clouds
with tails like commas. She reviewed the things in her life—school, friends, parents, the ranch—and decided there were only three she would have missed with all her heart if she’d left for New York: Lance, Robbie, and Sprite. Tears stung her eyes at just the thought of leaving her horse, and she bent all the way down to hug Sprite’s neck, whispering words of remorse against her taut muscles.
They walked on. An hour passed. A great blue heron lifted out of the creek bed. She was almost at the Spooky Place. You knew you were close when your horse was stepping over a mishmash of tire tracks embedded in hardened clay, the imprints of generations of kids showing off. Weekend nights you could see bonfires, hear the radios from a dozen cars, but during the day it was deserted and back to nature, although there might be someone ditching school who went out there to not be found.
Lightning strikes had burned the shallow canyon black, felling trees at odd angles and leveling the brush from a gravelly flat rumored to be an old Lakota burial ground. Everything about the Spooky Place said demise. Life was in suspension here, while death sat down and lit a cigarette. Greenish puddles showed what was left of the creek, dormant under a trash pile of bleached branches. Deformed trunks of cottonwoods struggled through, putting out spiky twigs. There were no frogs and dragonflies, no clusters of monarch butterflies stopping to rest on their migration, as there had been when Jo was younger.
They came to a halt in a patch of shade, chilled by a cool wind, the only two living, warm-blooded beings in this boneyard of dreams. Or were they? A truck was parked near the fire pit but it wasn’t Robbie Fletcher’s. As she walked Sprite around, Jo saw a boy she knew from school, Brad Angerhoffer, sitting on the tailgate drinking from a pint.
They said hi and Jo dismounted. He was hunting antelope, he said, and asked if she’d seen any. She said no. Better anyway to wait until dusk and this seemed like a good place. He was outfitted for the day: Southern Comfort and a six-pack. She took a pull from the bottle and joined him in the truck bed, sitting on the cooler. She’d known Brad forever. His mom worked in the office at the high school, which was Brad Angerhoffer’s only claim to fame, besides the fact that he wore thick glasses. He wasn’t good-looking or particularly bright, but on the surface not a bad guy, either, and therefore invisible in the hordes that filled the lunchroom, hiding his shyness in a coterie of other clumsy boys that the popular girls might generously label “immature.”
Brad was pleased to have Jo Kusek to himself in the Spooky Place, even if she did say she was waiting for Robbie Fletcher. She played basketball and her brother was a bull rider, which made her socially untouchable, aside from the fact that her father was a mucky-muck in the government. But Fletcher was taking a long time and Jo Kusek was getting drunk, even crying. She was sad because her aunt was going home. Brad offered comfort. He managed to get three grubby fingers around her shoulder and ease her resistant body toward his one inch before princely Robbie Fletcher pulled up in his Ford, kicking up a talcum cloud.
Jo sprang off the tailgate and into his arms, and Brad could do nothing but watch. Robbie waved hello and Brad tossed him a beer in a manly way, then they all ended up leaning against a log under a half-wasted locust tree.
“What’s the big emergency?” asked Robbie.
“My life is ruined because my mother is a Communist!”
Brad chortled. “Is that a joke?”
“No! I’m so mad!” Jo said, pounding a fist against her own knee.
“What are you talking about?” asked Robbie.
“I was supposed to leave this stink hole and go and live with my aunt and uncle in New York, but when it all came out everyone starting yelling at each other and they left.”
“But being a Communist,” Brad said with awe. “Geez, that’s really serious, you’re supposed to turn people in for that.”
“She can’t turn in her own mother, dumb-dumb,” Robbie said.
“You can’t tell anyone!” Jo told Brad fiercely.
“I won’t,” Brad swore.
They sat in silence except for out-cursing one another at the swarming gnats. Jo leaned her head on Robbie’s shoulder while Brad drew circles in the dirt.
“Let’s run away,” said Jo.
Robbie stroked her hair. “Sure thing.”
“Let’s drive to San Francisco. We could stay with my aunt and uncle at their hotel.”
Brad said, “Your relatives must be rich.”
“Kind of. Yeah, I think so.”
Brad had an idea. “Let’s kill them and take their money!”
“You are such a nitwit,” Robbie said.
Jo smiled. She could feel Robbie’s hip press against hers. They understood each other. Both wanted Goofy to go.
“Then Jo could do whatever she wants,” Brad said.
Jo shivered. “Ugh, don’t talk that way. Did you hear about that robbery where a whole family was murdered?”
“When was this?” asked Robbie.
The wind shook the dead drooping branches of the locust tree, and the Spooky Place seemed a lot spookier.
“A year ago. It happened in Kansas. All four of them were shot to death in their own house.”
Just sitting next to Jo made Brad so horny, all he could do was jump up and grab her by the shoulders and growl, “Boom! Boom! Boom!”
Jo rolled her eyes and Robbie stood up, peeved.
“What the hell are you doing, Angerhoffer?” he said, giving him a shove.
“Nothing.”
“How about you take a hike?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Go to the store and get some more beer.”
Brad’s eyes were on the ground. “Okay,” he said, defeated. “I get it. Sure.”
They waited until they heard the engine turn and the passing crunch of tires.
“He’s not really coming back, is he?” said Jo.
“If he does, it’s his own damn fault for being stupid.”
Robbie took a blanket out of his truck.
“I can’t stay long,” said Jo. “I have to ride Sprite all the way home.”
“We’ll make do.” Robbie smiled, spreading the blanket on the ground.
They were lying down facing each other, lost in each other’s eyes. They’d made out with their clothes on, but this time was different. Aunt Marja said, Jo thought, unbuttoning her shirt, sometimes you have to take the plunge.
18
The principal’s office was a busy place where the opposing worlds of high school society—students and teachers, parents and staff—collided in a high-windowed room painted cheerful aqua, with a long polished oak worktop that kept the privileged in and the public out. Only honor students and parent volunteers were allowed behind the consecrated counter, which held banks of drawers containing file cards with sensitive information and, holy of holies, the microphone for the PA system that, if commandeered, could send disruptive messages through the loudspeakers into every classroom. As parent adviser to the yearbook, Betsy Kusek was one of the favored few who had access to the inner office. While others milled around waiting for Mrs. Kay Angerhoffer, the school secretary, to attend to their needs, Betsy would lift the hinged panel in the worktop and breeze right through. Until today.
Kay Angerhoffer, private secretary to the principal, Robert T. Emry, blocked her entry with a smile.
“Hello, Betsy. Can I help you?”
“Hello, Kay. I have an appointment to see Mr. Emry.”
“I’ll tell him you’re here.”
“And I have three more sponsors for the yearbook.” Betsy opened her purse and removed the forms with checks attached. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Excellent!” Kay Angerhoffer agreed.
She was tall and thin and wore glasses like her son, a young-looking forty-five. She had on a sheer white blouse with a polka dot scarf at the neck, and a maroon skirt with a matching jacket tucked at the waist. Nylons and heels. She was always businesslike, but kind to the students, and with two of her own—Brad and his younger brother
—at the school, Betsy thought of her not as an employee, but another overtaxed and sympathetic mom.
“How’s your husband’s campaign going?” Kay Angerhoffer asked.
“He’s getting a lot of support, it’s very exciting,” Betsy said.
She was trying to lift the panel on the counter, but it seemed to be locked from the other side.
“Do you mind opening this?” she asked.
“Why don’t you have a seat on the bench?” Kay Angerhoffer offered.
“These pledges have to go in the file.”
“I’ll take them,” the secretary said nicely. “We’re kind of crowded back here today.”
It didn’t look crowded to Betsy, but she didn’t think much of it. She sat down on the bench in the public area, next to a student who was being sent home because she was sick. The girl was listless and her cheeks were flushed. Betsy automatically eyed the distance to the nearest wastebasket, but was more preoccupied with what the principal might have in store for Jo. He had a reputation as a harsh taskmaster; on the drive out from the ranch she had tried to face the real possibility that after all her high jinks, her daughter could finally be expelled. Stell thought that was nuts—even Mr. Emry would never go that far—but Betsy had already decided if it came to that, she would call her sister, Marja, and beg her to let Jo go to school in New York.
The bell rang and the tide changed. The hall was filled with raucous students, some flowing into the office along with teachers checking their mailboxes. The sick girl’s mother came to pick her up—a young farm wife carrying a baby with a toddler in tow. Betsy watched the second hand on the big white clock go around. Thirty-five minutes later, Kay Angerhoffer lifted the entry panel in the counter and invited her inside.
Robert T. Emry had been principal of the high school since the new building opened in 1948. He was a self-sufficient bachelor and his private office reflected mental austerity. Mr. Emry liked things to be in tidy twos. He sat behind a dark walnut desk upon which there was nothing but a double-deck tray and two telephones. There were two wooden chairs for visitors and a large radiator beneath two bare windows. He had a high, deeply furrowed forehead with a narrow hairline winnowed by age so it resembled an archipelago of white hair brushed back to infinity. He was the kind of person who would never show you the back of his head.