by April Smith
Betsy smoothed the peach-colored nylon tea dress she’d worn for the occasion beneath her thighs and sat primly. Mr. Emry sat straight as a flagpole, forearms inside a pressed glen plaid jacket on the scrupulously empty desk, and hands resting in perfect symmetry on either edge of a single sheet of paper. His gaze was flat, his posture tense with the seeming strain of holding back on some terrible threat. Betsy was uneasy, wondering how she could feel so overpowered by a scrawny, bookish man behind a desk, until it came to her that the feeling was the same as when she’d been arrested and held in custody by the New York City police—afraid, immobilized, and stifled by authority…but the comparison was so improbable that she dismissed it out of hand.
When Mr. Emry finally spoke it was, astoundingly, not at all what Betsy was prepared for. Instead of giving her a stern talking-to about her out-of-control child failing classes and throwing firecrackers from a bus, possibly blowing her fingers off, or causing the driver to crash and kill everyone in a fiery inferno…instead of scolding Betsy about her failure as a parent…Mr. Emry was deferential. He agreed that suspension at home was not an ideal way of disciplining children and asked what punishment Betsy considered would fit the crime. When she came up blank, the principal had a suggestion: Robbie Fletcher and Jo Kusek would wash the windows of the school buses every day for the rest of the term.
Betsy almost clapped her hands with joy. The sentence was so much lighter than she’d anticipated that she actually thanked him and picked up her purse for a swift exit. But Mr. Emry remained seated, with the same unreadable stare through the two circles of the transparent frames of his glasses, further hiding his features behind a mask of blandness.
“Is something wrong, Mrs. Kusek?” he asked.
“Not at all! I think what you’ve said is very fair.”
“You look troubled in some way.”
“Do I?”
“Well, maybe it’s me. Something’s come up and I’d like your opinion. You’re one of our most trusted parents. Do you mind if I pick your brain?”
“Not at all.” Flattered, she settled back in the chair.
“We’ve been showing a movie in school called Communism on the Map—”
“My kids told me.”
“Good! Then you’re in a position to help! My question is how the message about the Russian threat is being received. I’m wondering if it’s too strong for children.” He lifted one hand in a gesture of openness. “Feel free to speak in confidence.”
He waited with such indulgence that Betsy quickly concluded that not only was her answer truly important to him, but that everything had changed—Jo had been punished and pardoned, and she no longer had to worry or be ashamed. She and the principal were back on equal footing. So eager was she to regain her status as a “trusted parent” that she ignored the cautionary warning she had sensed coming in. He was keen to know her opinion; why not be truthful?
“That movie has been on my mind as well, Mr. Emry.”
His shoulders shifted slightly. “In what way, Mrs. Kusek?”
“I don’t think a piece of propaganda should be shown in schools.”
“Go on.”
“Not everyone agrees the Russians are infiltrating the country with spy rings and such, or that there is such a thing as absolute evil. People are people, but from what I understand, the movie makes the Russians into despicable enemies. It stirs up prejudice and hate, like what Hitler did to the Jews.”
“You don’t think Communism is evil?”
Betsy wet her lips and gathered her thoughts, eager to use the opportunity to speak her mind. “I don’t believe public schools are the place for extremism of any kind,” she said boldly. “Our kids have no choice but to sit at their desks and watch this thing and be terrified of a nuclear disaster—is that fair? Is that democratic? In my thinking, the rigid and prejudiced views of the Far Right are more of a threat to our liberties than some far-fetched Communist invasion that has no basis in fact.”
Mr. Emry responded with a tight smile. “Duly noted!” He stood and shook her hand across the desk. “Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Kusek. We look forward to seeing Jo back at school.”
“So do I!” Betsy said merrily.
Going out, she and Kay Angerhoffer commiserated briefly about a retirement party planned for a beloved science teacher, and said a cordial good-bye.
When she was certain, by watching out the window, that Betsy Kusek had driven off campus, Kay Angerhoffer knocked, entered Mr. Emry’s office, and closed the door. He held up a finger signaling her to be silent, then pulled out a drawer in the massive desk, where a tape recorder installed by FBI special agents Wentworth and Breyer on a tip from Brad Angerhoffer’s mother, Kay, had been secretly documenting the interview with Betsy Kusek. He punched the stop button and the double reels halted.
She could hardly contain herself. “Well, Mr. Emry?”
“Well, Kay, it turns out that what your son Brad told you is absolutely true.”
She looked stricken. “Really? I was hoping he was mistaken about what Betsy’s daughter told him.”
“No doubt in my mind. Betsy Kusek is a Communist sympathizer.”
Kay Angerhoffer’s hand went to her throat. “How can you tell?”
“She gave herself away. They always do. Ducking questions. Twisting the truth.” He sighed regretfully and tapped the tape recorder. “It’s all right here. Thank God we were warned and kept her away from the school files.”
“You don’t think it’s contagious, do you?” Kay wondered.
“We’re going to put a stop to it right now.”
Kay fingered her polka dot scarf with worry. “What should we do?”
“We have to turn her in. It’s our civic duty,” he replied stoically. “In the meantime, it’s incumbent on us not to spread rumors or involve her child, so not a word—not even to your son. They’re the innocents in this Cold War. Just let me take care of it.”
“Yes, Mr. Emry.”
“I feel sorry for the daughter,” he mused. “No wonder she’s turned out to be a little rebel. She knows something’s not right in that house.”
“I feel terrible. Betsy’s such a nice woman, it’s hard to believe.”
“She’s been trained to appear that way. In any case, this is not for us to judge. Get me an outside wire, will you?”
Kay Angerhoffer hurried from the room and Mr. Emry sat down in his fortress. He felt suffocated by responsibility. He’d never had to face anything this big. He looked at the chair where Betsy Kusek had sat as if she’d left a stain. The phone on the right was buzzing. His hand shook as he lifted the office receiver and asked the outside operator to connect him to FBI headquarters in Pierre.
19
Cal was in that state of mind where you can drive twenty miles and get to where you’re going without a clue of how you got there. All he saw—without seeing it at all—was the dirt road barreling ahead of him until it turned at the signposts for the Crazy Eights Ranch, then the big house swung past and the barn came up on the right. He cut the engine in a swirl of dust, and fought to get his bearings in a familiar setting now grown strange.
He hadn’t come by the Roys’ in a while, and found the place looking tatty and run-down. The American flag still flew on a white pole in the driveway, and he wondered if it was true, what he’d heard, that Dutch had lowered it the day Joe McCarthy died. A pile of fallen antlers, bleached into stone, had been thrown into a disused fire pit in the front yard, and masonry was shedding off the cement silo. Before the drought, the silo would have held a winter’s worth of wheat. Now they used it to burn garbage.
There had been no answer at the front door, but the trucks were there so Cal headed down toward the pens, first sighting Lance, who was perched on a rail overlooking the ring where he trained with Scotty.
“Hi, Dad!” he called cheerfully. “What’re you doing here?”
Cal waved. “Dutch around?”
“He’s at the pond.”
C
al squinted toward the flat horizon, figuring Dutch must have taken a horse. He was about to get back into the wagon and drive up there, when Scotty Roy came out of the barn carrying two buckets of water, which he set near the pen that held the white bull.
The two men came toward each other and met halfway.
“How’s it going?” Scotty asked.
“I’ve got bad news,” Cal said. “Charlie Hauser is dead.”
Scotty took a long deep sigh and shook his head. “I’m real sorry to hear that. He was having a hard time of it, though.”
“He passed about an hour ago. Betsy was working at the hospital. She heard it was peaceful.”
“That’s a blessing.”
“I stopped by to tell your dad. I thought he should hear it in person and not over the phone.”
“Kind of you,” Scotty said, and his eyes were full of appreciation for the fact that he wouldn’t have to be the one to break the news to Dutch that a friend he’d known for sixty years was gone. “We’re losing the old-timers way too fast,” he added.
Cal turned toward the house. He’d acquired the cowboy habit of hooking his thumbs in his belt loops, the better to philosophically tug up his jeans. “Time is speeding up, that’s for sure. I remember the first night we drove up here, with Randy Sturgis, in the pouring rain,” he said.
“I remember opening the door and there was my old war buddy. Shockeroo!”
“Kind of was.”
“A wife and two babies? Who woulda thought, Kusek?”
“After the invasion, I didn’t know if you were dead or alive.”
Lance had hopped off the fence and scrambled to the small rise where they were standing.
“What’re you all talking about?” he asked breathlessly.
“Just swapping war stories,” Scotty said, faking a punch at the boy’s chest so that Lance brought up his arms in defense.
Cal was still thinking about the black storm that night. “You realize how long it’s been? Since we first came to South Dakota?”
Scotty nodded and shifted around to take in the whole property. “Every ten years you see the world in a whole different light,” he observed. “I guess you’ve decided to switch gears.”
“How do you mean?”
“Running for the U.S. Senate! My folks can’t stop talking about it.”
“What’re they saying?”
“They don’t favor more government, so they don’t know why you’d choose to waste your time in Washington, D.C.”
Cal laughed. “I see some talks with Dutch coming up.”
“He don’t like the United Nations. He thinks we should get out of there. According to him, the United Nations is a Communist plot.”
“Where’s he getting all this?”
“He and Mama joined the John Birch Society.”
“Hey, Dad—” Lance interrupted impatiently.
“The Birchers? The most ultraconservative right-wing bigots in America? Oh my Lord, say it ain’t so—” Cal began, but Lance was insistent.
“Hey, Dad! I’m gonna get on Beethoven.”
Cal left off his indignation and glanced distractedly at the pen that held the white bull. A black patch around one eye made him look like a sixteen-hundred-pound murderous pirate.
“Is that Beethoven?”
Lance nodded eagerly.
“He’s really rank!” the boy said with excitement. “He’s not like a practice bull.”
Cal turned to Scotty. “That true?”
Scotty shrugged. “He’s your three-year-old bucking bull. Don’t know yet. Has potential, though. Fast out of the chute and a mean spinner.”
“He’s not flat,” Lance put in, echoing the words he’d heard men use to talk about a bull who kicks or doesn’t. This one was bred to kick and never stop.
“No, he ain’t flat,” Scotty agreed. “But the key is attitude, not heredity. If the bull’s got heart. If he wants to work. You’ll get an argument about that from a lot of breeders, but I’m right.”
Cal chuckled. “Course you’re right.”
“Not always,” Scotty answered, squinting off with an impenetrable stare.
“You know this crazy loon once jumped off of a railroad car?” Cal told Lance.
Lance stared in wonder. “You really did that? Jumped off a train?”
“It was parked in the desert going nowhere,” Scotty said. “The thing ain’t budged in a hundred years.”
Cal’s scrupulousness got the better of him. “Sure it did,” he objected, like a fussy professor. “That was the train that brought in the troops.”
“Okay, you tell the story, Mister Stick Up Your Butt,” Scotty replied.
Lance blushed scarlet and collapsed in giggles. Nobody talked to his dad that way except his old army buddy, which made him want to join the service even more than ride bulls.
“Was this before you bailed out of the plane, Uncle Scotty?” he asked.
Scotty nodded. “We were waiting around doing nothing, so why not do something stupid?”
“Yeah, but then you saved the American soldiers on the beach,” Lance prompted, perhaps wondering why all of a sudden his father and Scotty were looking like they were peeved at each other and the story stopped.
“Dad?” Lance said urgently. “Come on!”
“Come on what?”
He raised his head toward his father. He would soon be of equal height. In the shadow of the cowboy hat, the boy’s smooth face was radiant with longing to prove that he, too, had the heart of a hero, like his dad and Scotty during World War II. They didn’t have to tell him; he knew it by heart: how his dad piloted the lumbering transport plane through pitch dark and crazy wind, how Uncle Scotty fearlessly plunged into space, falling through a barrage of shells coming from our own navy ships and landing on the beach to warn the other soldiers of the colossal mistake.
Every impulse in his body was craving that same test of fire, but there were no guns, just Beethoven, right now doing nothing but standing in the ring whipping his horns back and forth at flies, so the cascade of heavy white flesh hanging loose beneath his jaw swung like a pendulum. Bull snot shot across the pen like silver bullets, indicating the kind of power that neck might have, should it rapidly twist like a ratchet to throw you off his spiny back so he could lean down and gore your brains out.
“Dad! You have to watch me ride,” Lance said boldly.
Cal was stunned by the command in his clear young eyes and the firmness of his stance in the dust. Sensing the need coming off his son, Cal didn’t hesitate. “Better get geared up,” he said.
Lance sprinted off as if the answer had already been ordained—it had just taken a while—as the two men walked toward the enclosures, along the way sending panic through a herd of spotted quail-like birds scooting across the yard, all following in the same direction.
“This dry weather caused a plague of grasshoppers on us, just about destroyed the garden,” Scotty explained. “The old people kept saying we should get guinea hens, so we got sixty or seventy. They’ll eat a hundred grasshoppers a day each.”
“Make a difference?”
“Sure they do. It’s funny the way they hunt—they go in a pack like you see in the safari movies. They’re pretty good at working together. I’ve seen them terrorize a bobcat. They make a rattling sound when they all come at you at once. That bobcat took off.”
Cal smiled. “He was thinking, That’s not the way things are supposed to work.”
“No, they ain’t,” said Scotty, looking troubled again.
Cal, too, was searching for something that wasn’t apparent. For a while both were silent.
“Dad should be coming down soon,” Scotty said vaguely. “The blizzard of ’54 cost us half our stock and we still ain’t made it back. I wish he’d give it up. It’s pathetic.”
Dutch was stubbornly trying to piece his business together, every day going up to the pond where the air force boys had pulled his dead cows out from the ice floes.
�
�He goes up there hoping to preserve the water,” Scotty said. “But all that’s left got covered in blue algae. He thinks he’s going to build a fence to keep the cattle from drinking. I keep telling him we got two choices: haul water or sell off the rest of the livestock. He won’t do neither. He just stays angry. They hardly go off the property anymore except to Bircher meetings. There’s a secret book they won’t show me. Just as well. I know it’s about Negro- and Commie-hating.”
“Keep away from it, Scotty. It’s hate. It’s just plain poison, like that algae on your pond.”
“I don’t care for politics,” Scotty Roy agreed. “That’s their deal. I just want to get on with it, make some money. You know, bull riding has a life limit.”
As they got to the ring, Cal considered what kind of future lay ahead for Scotty on eight hundred acres of burned-out grassland, and a larger feeling of despair came over him. He regretted the fate of the Crazy Eights Ranch and tried for the hundredth time to toss aside the guilt he felt about stealing Dutch’s contract. Not stealing, really, but benefiting from another’s bad fortune. At the same time, Charmin’ Charlie’s death was becoming real. When Cal was a stranger at the Bison Café, Charmin’ Charlie put on a show of giving him a hard time, which Cal appreciated. Like the good-hearted kid on the baseball field, Charlie tossed the ball to the newcomer, inviting him into the game. Even when he was very sick, sucking oxygen through a tube, Charlie let Cal know he was still on his side. With Charlie gone, a marker had been laid.
Lance came out of the barn wearing his cowboy hat, chaps, spurs, and riding gloves, working his bull rope to soften it up.
Scotty said, “Ready to have some fun?”
“Yes, sir,” said Lance, heading for the maze of chutes that led to the ring.
“I appreciate you watching out for Lance,” Cal said. “Teaching him the right way.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Are you really going to let him on that animal?”
“Don’t think we can stop him, do you?”