Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  Cal lowered his eyes as the same strange feeling of separation in time came over him. He realized the Invasion of Italy had happened almost twenty years ago, and however Scotty Roy wanted to exaggerate his part, he’d risked his life to defend his country. After Cal called him on it, it had lain between them all these years. Maybe it was Charlie, or hopeless love for his boy, and for all the sons of unbending men, but Cal was flooded with the warmth of forgiveness.

  “You know how you said years go by and things look different?” Cal ventured at last. “Well, whatever’s happened between us, I’m sorry for it.”

  Scotty’s reply was ready, as if he’d been waiting for it. “No need to apologize. I’ll tell you something else,” Scotty said, as if he hadn’t been the one who’d started it. “I was PO’ed at the time, but you were right to turn down that land deal that my father offered and get your own place. I thought you were ungrateful, but to be truthful, I was jealous because you got out.”

  “It’s hard to work for someone else, especially your own father.”

  “He’s all right, just getting old. Will you do something for me now?” Scotty asked. “Will you pray with us?”

  Cal followed Scotty and Lance into the ring. They all knew the ritual. They got Beethoven into the chute, and worked the ropes, passing one beneath his hindquarters and another with a bell on it below his belly—as if he needed encouragement to kick, which he’d already started to do, massive hind legs striking the wooden planks so hard the apparatus shook all the way down the line.

  The bull secured, Cal, Scotty, and Lance went back into the ring. Unlike a competition, there was no one there to watch them except the sky as they took off their hats, knelt in the dirt, bent their heads, and placed their hands on one another’s shoulders in the brotherly bond of cowboys.

  “Heavenly Father,” they recited, “thank you, O Lord, for the many blessings You have given us. We ask that You be with us today in this rodeo arena, just like in the arena of life, and that You bestow Your protection on both bull and rider, and keep us safe in Your loving arms. Amen.”

  Cal couldn’t tell if the lump in his throat was because he’d never heard his son recite anything with such sincerity, or because some bottled-up part of himself was scared to death of what might happen when the 115-pound youngster got on an untamed animal filled with testosterone that weighed as much as a car, with nothing to hold on to but one hand on a rope, one fall away from paralysis or death. He desperately wanted to pull his boy away from danger, but at the same time realized that he had no place in what came next. It struck him that in his son’s world, he had become a bystander.

  Lance climbed into the chute and settled on the back of the bull, and there was Scotty right beside him, making sure all the ropes would hold. His face tight with concentration, Lance gave the nod, and it was up to his father, waiting in the ring, to pull steadily on the rope so the gate would open smoothly, with no collisions inside the chute.

  Cal performed his part and the white bull jumped out with fast, explosive kicks—wild to get that wolf or coyote off his back where its teeth could shred his muscles and bring him down. Lance held on, his free arm snapping wildly, and Cal’s eyes blurred to see the scrawny body tossed into the air over and over, coming down hard on the bull’s spine. With every loft he caught his breath—would this be when they lost their son? Would this? The animal let loose, enraged, pivoting on his forelegs in a dizzying tornado of revolutions, until Lance flipped off like a stuffed doll and landed facedown in the dirt, while the bull kept spinning, enormous hooves coming down with the force of a dropped ton of steel, missing the boy by inches as he tried to roll away. Where is Lance? Cal lost him in the dust. Was he stuck on the horns? Scotty darted out in front, waving his arms to get the bull’s attention, and Cal was shouting, “Go-go-go,” pulling at the gate. Beethoven saw the opening and trotted indignantly into the chute, still kicking up his hind legs, and there was Lance on top of the fence, red-cheeked, victorious.

  20

  “Charlie Hauser’s mom and dad were homesteaders who came up from Colorado on a pair of saddle horses in 1891. Charmin’ Charlie liked to say it takes someone special to love the prairie—and someone loco to live here.”

  The mourners chuckled warmly.

  “Charlie was a decorated airman who flew in World War I,” the reverend went on. “When he came back he married a local gal, Mary Clawson, who has since passed away. He loved to tell the story of how he almost lost his wife—not because of another woman, but because of a tractor!

  “One day Charlie decided his youngest were ready to drive the Harvester—at the ripe old age of three and four. He put one on the pedal and the other steering. When Mary came out and saw her babies careening nonstop across the yard, she just about divorced him there and then. But Charlie didn’t see the problem. He’d told the kids, ‘When you get to the fence, just turn the key!’ ”

  The congregation broke out in laughter and Cal’s hand tightened around Betsy’s. They were gathered at the Pine Lawn Memorial Park, out on Mount Rushmore Road, a few days after Charmin’ Charlie Hauser lost his battle with cancer at the age of sixty-three. He was remembered as easygoing and dependable, a good soul who never asked for much except to go along, and so he had a lot of friends. There were the cardsharps from the senior center where he played pitch and rummy, Bison Café morning regulars Vaughn Anders and T.W., as well as the couple’s six children—all of whom had gone to college—and their clans.

  Affection for the man was reason enough to attend, but it was hard to ignore the fact that a funeral for a long-timer like Charlie would bring everyone in for miles, a pot of gold for a candidate. When Cal and Betsy arrived, there were plenty of cars in the parking lot. Randy Sturgis’s maroon Plymouth was there, along with Spanky Anderson’s truck with decals from his trips covering the windows. They recognized Dutch Roy’s pickup and the jeep driven by Master Sergeant Hayley Vance, who was paying his respects to an air force veteran. Just as they joined the line to enter the stone chapel, Thaddeus Haynes pulled up in his aqua-green Cadillac convertible, signs proclaiming VOTE REPUBLICAN—VOTE HAYNES unabashedly displayed.

  He got out carrying his usual pink Mrs. Ellen’s bakery box as if it were the sacrament. Betsy and Cal maintained their composure, chatting with people in front of them, while Haynes worked the line toward the door, balancing the box on his fingertips like a waiter, while shaking with the other hand like a maître d’, humbly acknowledging the recognition that came with his new status. The Hour of Truth was televised, now that 78 percent of households in Pennington County owned a TV, and Thaddeus Haynes had become a “personality”—a big boost to his chances of beating Calvin Kusek in the race for U.S. Senate.

  Inevitably the two came face-to-face and Haynes’s pompous smile switched to appropriate mournfulness. The competitors greeted each other stiffly. Standing side by side showed up their differences: Cal, with the features of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, body leaned-out from physical work, wearing a charcoal-gray Continental suit he could still fit into from his days as a New York attorney. Haynes, carrying thirty pounds around the belly, was dressed in a brown corduroy sport jacket, flannel slacks, a tan pinchecked shirt, and a maize-yellow acetate tie with a duck in flight. He inclined his head with insincere sincerity; beneath the hard square brow, half-mad eyes were ringed by lines of emotional exhaustion. You wondered if in private moments, in a hotel room in a strange city, say, this seemingly self-possessed, single-minded demigod broke down in inconsolable tears.

  After they’d exchanged regrets about Charlie Hauser, the Republican hopeful said, “God be with you,” and pushed his way into the chapel, slipping into a seat up front with the family, where the whole church would have its eyes on him.

  The service ended with a reading from Ecclesiastes and the hymn “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” played on an electric keyboard. The congregation stood. The front doors were opened, flooding the wood-paneled chapel with bright daylight. The cof
fin was carried out. The pastry box Haynes had placed on a chest in the foyer was causing some confusion—is it proper to grab a doughnut on the way to a grave site?

  In normal years, the congregants would have been greeted by the pleasant sound of a waterfall that flowed behind the chapel while they paused in the shade of the pines before interment. But the brook had vanished, along with the dragonflies that had served to distract children from the business at hand; mosses had curled into tiny fists and turned brown, and all you heard was screaming crows.

  Today the assembly was forced to leave the shade for a sun-parched field, where wilted floral arrangements marked the graves. “Neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, nor anything else in creation will separate them from the love of God,” the reverend had said, but hope turned to weary resignation when they faced the eye-searing vista of scorched earth. Here we go again, they thought, no break from the punishing heat.

  Dutch Roy walked toward the newly dug grave, each thud of his cane harsher than the last. His uneven gait slowed him down, which made him angry, and when Doris wasn’t around—like today, visiting a cousin up in Spearfish—he was free to show it, pounding the tip of the walking stick into the dried turf. He never fully recovered from the accident that broke his pelvis and gave him pain at night, nor from the betrayal by his two boys—Scotty, the natural son, who wanted them to sell out so he could go and ride the rodeo circuit, and Cal Kusek, the perfect son, who’d refused the offer—from Dutch’s heart—to be partners on the family ranch. He could see Cal and Betsy in the crowd, young and confident, like those other Democratic elites, John and Jackie Kennedy, all flash and dash.

  “I’m surprised he brought his wife,” said an evangelical voice beside him.

  Thaddeus Haynes offered his arm, but Dutch pulled away irritably, snapping, “Leave me alone. No one’s putting me in a box just yet.”

  “Still,” Haynes continued smoothly, “mighty bold to bring her on a sacred day like this.”

  “Who are you talking about?” asked Dutch.

  “Betsy Kusek.”

  “What about her?”

  “First off, Betsy Kusek isn’t her real name.”

  Dutch halted with both hands pressed on the silver top of the walking stick, peering down at Haynes, who noticed that the old man’s skin had gone flaky and he’d missed shaving off a patch of white stubble on his chin. Still, he stood like a timeworn monument in the sun, even taller in his cowboy hat and wearing his best funeral clothes.

  “She was born Coline Ferguson,” Haynes explained. “Changed her name to Betsy.”

  “So what?”

  “Suspicious, don’t you think?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, it is, according to my friends in the FBI.”

  “All right, I’ll play along. What do your friends in the FBI say?” Dutch said mockingly.

  “That Coline Ferguson changed her name to Betsy in order to sound more American.”

  Dutch looked doubtful. “Now you’ve got me scratching my head,” he said. “Of course she’s American. What’s the point of that?”

  “When a gal has questionable associations, she doesn’t want to stand out.”

  The old rancher guffawed. “Well, she’s married to Kusek, no hiding that association!”

  “Didn’t you two have a falling-out?” Haynes prodded. “Wasn’t it over a contract with the air force base?”

  “Yes, well, Kusek just was quicker on the draw.”

  “Let’s call a spade a spade, Dutch. Cal Kusek stomped you when you were down. After you opened your hand to him.”

  Dutch’s gaze met the other’s sharply. “What are you up to, Thaddeus?”

  “Tell me this: How’s your herd doing?”

  “Just about back to where we were.”

  “I’m going to share something that might be of use, but it stays between us.”

  Dutch squinted uncertainly in the shade of his hat. “Okay.”

  “Back in New York, Kusek’s wife was a member of the Communist Party.”

  “What?”

  “True.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “Someone had a suspicion and called the FBI. I’ve got friends at the bureau. They let me know right away.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Dutch, amazed.

  “She left New York, changed her name, and here she is. An avowed Communist spy living among us.”

  “Ah, come on, that don’t make sense. Why send a spy to the middle of nowhere? Why not someplace that matters, like Sioux Falls?”

  “Think about it. They’ve been planning this. Kusek, say he wins, becomes a U.S. senator. They move to Washington, D.C. Now his wife’s in the perfect position to pollute the government with Communist ideals.”

  “Maybe Cal don’t know what his wife is up to,” Dutch ventured.

  Haynes shrugged. “Maybe, at best, he fell for a she-devil. But the way I look at it, someone with good intentions doesn’t steal a contract out from under a friend. And you’ve been a good friend, Dutch.”

  Dutch wasn’t convinced. He considered himself a fine judge of character, and looking back at the greenhorn who showed up on his doorstep, a young father drenched to the bone with his kids, who worked with the Roys side by side…as hurt and angry as he’d been…Nope. As deeply as his anti-Communist convictions as a Bircher went, Dutch still couldn’t see Cal Kusek as a fellow traveler.

  But Haynes pressed the point. “He grabbed that contract because he needs the money.”

  “Everybody needs money—”

  “But for immoral purposes. To raise money for his campaign. So he can get to Washington. Don’t you see? That’s why they’re here in out-of-the-way Rapid City. It’s all part of their evil plan to further the interests of the Soviet Union from inside our own government.”

  Dutch didn’t answer. He was still trying to make sense of it.

  “We need to stop him, right now,” Haynes insisted. “Are you with me?”

  “What exactly are you asking for?”

  “We get Hayley Vance on our side. Then we get you that contract back.”

  “How? Is Vance in on this?”

  “He will be, when he realizes he’s got a traitor on his payroll. It’s up to us to expose Calvin Kusek and Coline Ferguson for what they are. If you don’t believe me, consider this,” he said, thinking fast to come up with an irrefutable argument: “Kusek won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance.”

  “What?”

  Haynes whispered, “He refuses to pledge the American flag.”

  They had reached the grave site and stood among the assembled in the brutal sun. Dutch looked carefully over at Cal, whose head was bowed, as the reverend consecrated the burial. Could a decorated airman be a traitor? Maybe he was captured and brainwashed during the war. The logic of Thaddeus Haynes’s pronouncements squeezed around his head like a tight hatband. There seemed to be no escaping them.

  “In the midst of life we are in death. Of whom may we seek for succor?”

  Dutch Roy’s mind drifted from the reverend’s words. He hadn’t told Thaddeus Haynes the truth about his herd. It was not up to speed, not by a long shot. He had no cows ready for market. But he did know where he could get beef from Wyoming to put a deal together to supply the base, with a nice cut for him as broker, and with that, he could buy new stock, reclaim his losses…He looked across the grave at Master Sergeant Hayley Vance in his blue dress uniform with the gloves and the epaulets, and decided he wouldn’t lose anything by talking to the man.

  “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord, Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Charles; and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him…and give him peace. Amen.”

  Dutch shuddered. One by one the mourners threw dirt on the coffin, way down in that grave. His eye caught Thaddeus Haynes’s and a look
passed among the three of them: Dutch, Haynes, and Vance. Dutch couldn’t help thinking he was helping to bury his hoped-for son, Cal, along with poor old Charlie.

  21

  When Brad Angerhoffer sauntered up to the table where the girls’ basketball team ate lunch, everything went into slow motion. At least Jo would remember it that way, the shock of what he would do next freezing her intelligence so every detail crystalized: his smeary glasses. Magnified eyes. The crimson flame of a shirtsleeve as he raised his arm to strike. A strangely contemplative expression on his skinny donkey face as it fixed on hers, acknowledging with a smirk that he knew exactly what he was doing. One swipe and he would change Jo Kusek’s destiny forever. Pretty. Rich. Going out with Robbie Fletcher. No longer. Fletcher wouldn’t stand the sight of her once he knew. Like Brad himself, she would become an outcast, and they would live together in a world of hell.

  “Bastard!” he called her.

  Jo was hungering for that first bite of a pork roast sandwich she’d brought from home, on soft white bread with mayonnaise and sweet pickle. Her mouth was open and trusting as a baby’s, when Brad slapped the sandwich right out of her hand—sideways, a perfect hit—so it flew apart and scattered over the metal lunch tray like pieces of a plane wreck.

  There was a shrill gasp from the players on the girls’ basketball team. Nobody dared intrude into their elite clubhouse during the lunch period, a private safety zone, off-limits for anyone but athletes, far above the pushing and shoving, bullying and profanity that went on among the lower classes. Team tables were fortresses. Breaching one could bring instant martyrdom, and Brad Angerhoffer wasn’t that brave. What is he trying to do?

  Jo shook her head in disbelief. “Is that a joke?”

  “Not as much as you,” Brad Angerhoffer said. “Bastard.”

  The players clicked their tongues and grimaced in astonishment. Jo stared hard at her attacker, willing him to remember that just a few days ago they’d been friends and drinking buddies in the Spooky Place, talking loose and fast. Now he was behaving like a jerk.