In Open Spaces

by Russell Rowland

  “How about that Stan?” I said to her, hoping to break through her mood. “He’s something else, huh?”

  “Yeah.” She answered without enthusiasm. “He’s great.”

  We continued wordlessly on to the house as I wondered about the source of Rita’s surliness. Once inside, I sat quietly in the living room, smoking a cigarette, while Rita put the boys to bed. We generally sat and talked for a while before bed, and I hoped that she wouldn’t sneak off to her room without following that ritual.

  She did come out, settling into her rocking chair, picking up the socks she was knitting for one of the boys. She held the socks closer to her face than usual, and her eyes were unfocused.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “You sure?”

  Again she nodded. But in the next moment, she aimed one of those unfocused eyes toward me, winking through a narrow opening.

  “What if it’s him, Blake?”

  I blinked. “What if it’s who?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “What if it’s Jack?”

  A slight, confused grin came to my face. “You mean the murder? You couldn’t be serious.”

  Rita looked up with defiance. “Why not?”

  “Oh, come on, Rita. Jack’s not a murderer.”

  “No?”

  I paused, thinking about what I was saying, realizing that I really didn’t know, that it wasn’t out of the question.

  “I need another drink,” Rita said, lifting herself to her feet.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  Rita stopped and turned, frowning at me. “Blake.”

  “I’m sorry. Actually, maybe I’ll join you.”

  I watched Rita teeter toward the kitchen. “I didn’t know you had anything around here.”

  She smiled over her shoulder. “Yeah, well…you don’t know everything, you know.”

  I smiled.

  Rita came back with a bottle and two glasses. She set one on the table next to me and poured, spilling a little. Then she returned to her chair and poured herself a glass. She drank a healthy amount, then turned to me.

  “I think it’s him, Blake.”

  I sighed, shaking my head, studying Rita. “You don’t really think that.”

  Rita nodded. “I do, Blake. I really do.”

  She was actually too insistent somehow, as if she was exaggerating in order to convince me, or herself.

  “I just don’t think it could possibly be him, Rita. I mean, this is a very different thing than…than…”

  “Than George.”

  “Exactly.”

  Rita drank more. “How? How’s it different?”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I always figured that whatever happened between George and Jack, if anything did happen…well, I just figured it was an accident. Either that, or a fight. I figured maybe they got into an argument, and that Jack…well, that maybe things got out of hand.” I took a drink. “That’s how I always pictured it.”

  Rita drained her glass, to my mild alarm, and refilled it. “But what if that isn’t the way it happened, Blake? What if it was uglier than that? Did anyone check George’s body? Did anyone look at it?”

  I lowered my head. Of course all of this had occurred to me before. Of course I’d wondered about it. Nobody had checked the body. As far as I knew. But I was hesitant to tell Rita this. Instead, I decided to probe her a little more, for her own ideas about Jack.

  “Rita…you know Jack better than anybody. You’ve seen him at his worst.”

  She blew a puff of disgust from her pursed lips. “That’s for sure.”

  “So can you really say that you think he’s capable of something like that? Honestly?”

  Finally, Rita got thoughtful, focusing her eyes on the glass between her ranch-scarred hands. She shook her head slowly, sadly. “I don’t know, Blake. Sometimes I think I know. I remember one time…one night before little George was born…Jack got mad at me for something or other. Of course, you can never remember what started it years later—things that seemed so important at the time. Anyway, he usually started yelling when he was mad. I was never very scared of him, really. It was mostly noise, you know. Like a baby crying. He wanted me to pay attention to him. Anyway…” She waved a dismissive hand. “That night was different. This time he got real quiet.” Rita raised her eyes. “I don’t know if I can explain why, Blake. But it was much more frightening, that quiet. He looked at me, and I don’t even remember what he said. All I remember is that I was really scared, Blake. I was scared just from the way he was looking at me.” Rita dropped her eyes again, back to her glass, which she raised once more, sucking half the contents into her mouth.

  I didn’t know what to say. The story sent a chill through me. But Rita wasn’t finished. She raised her head once more, and her eyes had become bleary, drooping from alcohol.

  “You know what the scariest part of that is, Blake?” She fixed a gaze on me, as glazed as it was.

  I met her eyes, shaking my head.

  “I didn’t know about George then. I hadn’t heard yet.”

  I held her look for a moment longer, then dropped my eyes. “Mm,” I said, not underestimating the power of this fact, because although I didn’t understand it, I knew how much this woman loved my brother. I could imagine how frightening it must have been to see this side of Jack.

  We sat quietly for a while, with the only sound being the familiar click of locust wings outside, the almost clocklike ticking, as if they were measuring the time before the next victim packed up and gave in.

  “You know, Blake…”

  I raised my head, meeting the now bleary eyes. She had an odd, dreamy expression.

  “What, Rita?”

  “Sometimes I wish Jack was you.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “Sometimes I wish you were Jack. I wish he was himself but also you.”

  I shook my head, intrigued but assuming the booze was doing the talking now. “I’m not sure what you mean by that, Rita.”

  She smiled, her eyes bathing me with the warmth I had first noticed the day I met her. I couldn’t help but smile back.

  “Jack…well, Jack has a lot of…a big sense of adventure…of possibility.”

  She paused. I nodded, slightly insulted by the insinuation that I did not.

  “But you…well, you, Blake…you are just so damn sweet. You’re always thinking about other people…what might make them a little happier.” She paused, still smiling. I felt my face fill with blood. “Not Jack.” She shook her head. “He’s a taker. He’s a taker. He never thinks about me. Or you. Or these kids.” She gestured vaguely toward the boys’ room.

  Although part of me, for some odd reason, wanted to convince Rita that Jack cared about her and her kids, I knew very well that she was right. So I said nothing, looking at my hands.

  “I sometimes wish I’d met you first, Blake.” I felt a hand on my own, and it was as if I had just been bitten by a rattler. I jumped to my feet, fumbling with my chair, trying to push it in, but somehow tripping over it, and mumbling about how it was time to get a little shut-eye.

  Rita started laughing, a self-conscious chuckle. “Blake, you’re like a shy school kid. You’re as shy as a kid in school.”

  “Yeah…well…I think I need to get some sleep. Maybe you should, too. Huh, Rita? It’s late.”

  I escaped to my bedroom, and I heard Rita retire to her own room. But I couldn’t sleep, thinking about her. Or more accurately, I couldn’t sleep thinking about what she said. Although it had always been obvious that Rita was fond of me, she had never given any indication, any slight hint, that she was fond of me in the same way that I was fond of her. And it seemed to me a cruel twist that this information would come out when she was in that condition. Now I could only wonder whether she actually meant it.

  For the next week, questions of who and where the murderer was took our county hostage. Because we didn’t have telephones yet, and because
Annie Ketchal didn’t want to deliver the mail in the middle of the night until they caught the killer, we relied on her to fill us in each day on the news. But there was little to report. In fact, the only reports she did have were rumors, most of which were absurd. It seemed that of the sixty-nine people who made up the population of Alzada, everyone over the age of fifteen was a suspect, whether there was any hint of a motive or not. But apparently, most people thought that Tex Edwards, the man whose first wife drowned in a mud puddle, was the guilty party. Although Tex’s wife said he was home all night, there was much conjecture that she was scared to tell the truth. Johnny Berrenda even claimed that he’d seen Tex out that night, but everyone knew that if Johnny had been sober, it would have been the first night in several years.

  It was a rough time for the drifters in the area. They were used to being fed and given a bed without question. But they were now sent on their way with a bundle of food under their arms and an evil eye at their backs until they were out of sight.

  Stan and Muriel stayed an extra three days because she was too scared to leave. Stan finally insisted, because he had to get back to work. But they took the back road, through Ekalaka, just to make sure.

  It was immediately evident that Rita had no memory of our drunken conversation. Aside from a headache, she acted as if everything was just as it always had been the next day. There was no sign of discomfort after that. So I found myself in the awkward position of living with the question of Rita’s objectivity that night, as well as her revelations about Jack. The situation made me tense, and withdrawn, which only added to the stifling atmosphere.

  Exactly one week after the murder, we gathered at the big house for Sunday dinner. The week of intense apprehension had permeated our homes. Every glance was furtive. Any unexpected sound had us all jumping a foot off the ground. We sat down to a table of tough antelope meat. The lettuce was tired, the carrots juvenile, almost yellow.

  “Mom, this salad doesn’t taste right,” Teddy complained to Rita.

  “You better just learn to appreciate what you have here,” Rita said impatiently. “You better learn we’re lucky to even have a garden right now. A lot of people don’t even have gardens.”

  “A lot of people don’t have any food at all,” Mom added. “You’ve seen those men come to the door, Teddy?”

  Teddy pouted, picking at his food.

  “I think he gets the point,” Dad said.

  “George, don’t interrupt now. We don’t want to give the boy two different messages, do we?” Mom said, not looking at Dad, her head tilted.

  “I’m not giving him a different message. I agree he should appreciate what we got, but Rita already said it once. We don’t need to beat the kid over the head with it.”

  A tear leaked from the corner of Teddy’s eye.

  “Mom, Dad,” Rita said in a warning tone. “Is this really necessary?”

  There was a brief, fuming silence, during which Teddy ate slowly, the tears still trickling. It was Helen who broke the silence.

  “Teddy, you know, I remember one time when I was just about the same age as you are now…we were eating supper, and my mother had cooked up some turnips, and I hated turnips. Oh, I hated turnips so much. I still…well, I shouldn’t say that. But I did not like turnips at all. So I told my mother in no uncertain terms that I was simply not going to eat my turnips.”

  Helen had Teddy’s full attention, and he forgot to cry. His eyes were wide, and a slight smile began to curl his lips.

  “Well, Teddy, can I tell you what my mother did that night?”

  “What?” Teddy asked. “What did she do?”

  “My mother got right up out of her chair, right up from the table, and she went down to the root cellar, and she marched right back up into the dining room and she dropped the biggest, ugliest raw turnip on my plate. And she asked me whether I thought I could eat that whole turnip by myself, raw and ugly that way.”

  Teddy looked scared to death, imagining the possibility of what would happen next. His brow worried.

  “Did you have to?” Teddy asked. “Did she make you eat it?”

  “Well, thank goodness, no. But you know what she did? She held that big ugly thing right up to me and said that there were people in the world that would actually kill each other just to have one ugly turnip like that. I never forgot that.”

  “Do you think it’s true?” Teddy asked.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Helen said. “I’m sure it is.”

  “Wow,” Teddy said, and the effect of the story was quite immediate. He lowered his head and started shoveling the salad into his mouth as if it was a birthday cake.

  But after a short silence, little George, who was nine and had been his usual mum self during the entire meal, mumbled into his plate, “It’s still not very good.”

  At which point my mother stood up in grand fashion, her shoulders thrown back, and stalked out of the house. We heard the root cellar door clunk open, and we all sat in quiet anticipation, waiting to see what hideous foodstuff she would find to instruct her grandson with.

  We all sat eating, heads down, Teddy looking wide-eyed around the table, George doing his best to appear indifferent.

  “I like turnips,” he said after a minute.

  And although it was a great line, we were all aware of the seriousness of the situation. No one laughed.

  But Mom did not reappear. Two minutes passed, then three, and there was no sign of her, and we heard nothing. If not for the image of the scathing remark I would have to endure if I went down there and she was fine, I would have gotten up right then and checked to see if she was all right. The worried look on Dad’s face told me that he was thinking the same thing. But I hesitated, and just moments later, we heard the most horrific scream echo from outside. We were out of our chairs and through the back door in a flash. All except Dad.

  “I’m going to grab the Winchester,” he called out.

  The root cellar was right outside, to the right of the back door. I was the first to turn the sharp corner, and when I stumbled down the steep stairs leading to the cellar, the first thing I saw was Mom’s back. She was squatting on the floor, and a pair of denim-clad legs kicked away behind and beneath her. Mom was rocking a little, and when I got up close, I saw that she had a man pinned to the ground and had her hands around his neck. His face was too dirty to determine whether it was red, but his eyes looked as if they were about to explode out of his head.

  “Mom, you’re gonna kill him,” I shouted, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Mom, you’re killing him.”

  But she was in a trance, and she continued to rock six inches forward, then back, the muscles in her arms and neck taut, her mouth in a teeth-clenched smile of concentration. The man gasped for air. I dropped to my knees, and threw my arms around her and leaned to one side.

  “Somebody get ready to jump on him,” I yelled.

  “I got him.” Dad appeared behind me, rifle at his shoulder.

  I pulled Mom as gently as I could onto her side and held her there, both of us breathing in steady, full gusts.

  The man was choking, holding his own throat, trying to lift himself to his elbow. Dad held his rifle, aiming it right at the guy’s head. There was a pistol lying on the ground, which Bob picked up. Food was strewn everywhere—potatoes, dried fruit, apples, some half-eaten.

  “Mom, how did you get the gun from him?” Rita asked.

  “What gun?” Mom said. “I didn’t see any gun.”

  I chuckled, trying to imagine how this whole scene played itself out, and thinking about how this would only elevate Mom’s reputation around the county.

  “Mom?” Teddy peeked out from behind Rita.

  “What, honey?”

  “Is this one of those people?”

  “What people?” Rita turned and looked at Teddy.

  “One of those people that Aunt Helen was talking about. One of those people who would kill somebody for a turnip.”

  The silence that followed wa
s brief but filled with revelation as we watched the skeletal figure in front of us try to find some air. It was as if we all suddenly realized that this was a human being—that despite the fact that he was a murderer, he was also someone who was simply desperate for food. It excused nothing, of course, but it made me think about how the death we had seen over these desperate years had numbed us. A moment before Teddy brought this to our attention, I wouldn’t have considered this guy for a moment.

  “Well…” Rita said. “I guess so, honey. Yes. I guess it is.”

  9

  fall 1935

  I stood in front of the mirror, trying to tie a knot in a string behind my head. A black cardboard disk covered my left eye, and I had a red bandanna tied pirate-style on top of my scalp.

  “You guys ready?” I yelled.

  “Just about,” Rita answered.

  This was the end of two weeks of preparation for Bob’s thirtieth birthday party. I let my whiskers grow, and Rita and I had been sewing costumes for ourselves and the boys. Helen had shown a gift for planning parties, although Rita and I were reluctant participants for the dinosaur birthday party she threw for George. For that one, we dug for previously planted bones. For the Knights of the Round Table party she threw for Dad, we battled with cardboard swords, and the kids even jousted, charging each other on their horses with lances Helen had sewn. She stuck a willow pole into two long tubes of fabric, then stuffed them so full of wool that they held their shape but were still soft enough that they wouldn’t hurt anybody. It was just one more example of Helen’s innovative ideas.

  It proved impossible to not have a good time at one of her parties. In fact, the parties had become a welcome relief from the relentless emotional pummeling of the Depression. The days between raindrop sightings increased, and instead of rain clouds, the sky filled with the foreboding shadow of locust swarms. The thick clay ground cracked and curled, and carcasses were left to rot away, eventually becoming just one more isolated arrangement of sunbaked bones.