by Ninie Hammon
He had almost filled the top rail on that end of the barn. Another couple of sticks and all the boys would shift down one rail.
“Don’t you be thinkin’ ’bout Shelly now, hear?” The pimply-faced boy sent the remark up to Gabe along with another stick loaded with dope. “All the blood drains out of your head into your pants, you’ll get dizzy and fall smack down on top of us.”
Gabe ignored the remark and concentrated hard, trying to hear through the walls. Nothing. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes on the back of his arm. It was at least 20 degrees hotter up in the top of the barn than it was outside, which meant it had to be 100-110 degrees where he stood—and it wasn’t even noon yet.
They’d started early, as soon as there was enough sunshine to see what they were doing in the unlighted barn, and they’d worked straight through, no breaks. Everybody wanted to get the job done and get out of there.
Jesse wobbled with the dope-laden stick he was passing up the line. Though just 14 months younger than Gabe, Jesse was six inches shorter and 50 pounds lighter, and marijuana was harder to work with than tobacco. He picked up a plant that had fallen off the stick and the other boy on the floor helped him fit it back in place so they could pass the stick up the line. Gabe reached down and grasped the end of it when it got to him. As he raised it above his head, the long, willowy plants slid over his shirtless, sweating back, laying down a swath of itchiness he couldn’t reach to scratch.
“You ever get nicotine poisoning?” he asked the black man on the tier below him. In his early 30s, he was the oldest worker in the barn.
“Nope, but my uncle did once and he was sick as a dog!”
Nicotine poisoning was a little known malady that afflicted tobacco workers, particularly when they were housing burley at the end of the season. Working in the heat, sweating, the pores of their skin open as the leaves dragged across their shoulders, some men absorbed so much nicotine that they passed out or suffered violent nausea and diarrhea.
“Maybe you could get dope poisoning the same way,” Gabe wondered aloud as he lowered the stick to the rail and began to scoot it into place.
He had never smoked a joint, never used drugs of any kind and never intended to. He’d watched the lives of too many friends go up in dope smoke, watched them stop caring about their grades or their families or their futures. Gabe was focused. He knew where he was going and smoking dope wouldn’t get him there.
But what if this made him high? Wouldn’t that be a kick?
There was a thump against the side of the barn, loud enough they all heard it. So did the team of six boys working at the other end of the barn. Everybody froze, stopped breathing. Then they heard voices outside, loud, angry voices.
The man who’d hired them had shown them the sentries posted out in the woods all around the barn. Wouldn’t nothing get past those guys, he’d said. So what was happening?
All of a sudden, the doors on both ends of the barn slammed inward at once; Kentucky State Police troopers swarmed inside, their guns drawn.
Gabe’s heart began to hammer in his chest, banging away like it did when he was 7 and the black widow spider appeared on the log he’d picked up off the woodpile. When it crawled onto his hand, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even scream, just watched it—felt it!—creep on tiny, tickling legs up his arm, across his bare shoulder, around his neck, down his chest and belly onto his jeans and off onto the ground. He hadn’t even stomped it or smashed it with the log in his hand. He’d just watched it crawl in slow motion back into the woodpile and disappear.
The gray-uniformed men below him were moving in slow motion, too, like spiders swarming over the barn floor. Then one of them, a big officer wearing one of those ridiculous, flat-brimmed KSP trooper hats, looked up, pointed a gun at him, and started yelling.
Gabe’s heart was pounding so loud he honestly couldn’t hear what the officer was shouting.
He’d had nightmares about getting caught. This was the third summer he’d housed marijuana. He knew lots of guys who did it every summer just like he did and it didn’t seem to bother them a bit. They’d show up at school in the fall, showing off the clothes and stereo systems and other junk they’d bought. You could make $500 a day, tax free, in a dope barn, more in a couple of long weekends than he made the whole rest of the summer sacking groceries at Brewster Market. He saved just about everything he earned, had stashed away quite a little nest-egg.
But he understood the risks; the penalties were unthinkable. Get busted and you weren’t looking at simple possession. They’d get you for marijuana cultivation for sure, maybe even trafficking. Cultivation was one to five years; trafficking was five to 10 years. And if you were 17, they tried you as an adult. Gabe was 18; Jesse had turned 17 four days ago.
A felony conviction would stay on your record the rest of your life. No medical school would admit a criminal.
“I said, get your hands out where I can see ’em,” the officer shouted at him. “Do you hear me, out where I can see ’em. Now!”
All the sounds were magnified, echoed like the barn was an empty rain barrel. Jesse was sobbing. He’d clasped his hands behind his head like the cops said and a trooper grabbed them one at a time, twisted them behind his back and handcuffed him.
All the other workers were on the ground now. The officers handcuffed them as well, while Gabe stood frozen like a hood ornament way up on the top rail.
His pants were suddenly wet. It was sweat, had to be sweat soaking through.
Another trooper joined the one who had his gun trained on Gabe.
“He won’t move,” the first officer said.
“Get those hands out where I can see ’em, son” the second officer called out menacingly as he pulled his gun from his holster and pointed it with both hands at Gabe. “You don’t want me to have to come up there after you.”
Finally, Gabe’s body responded to the commands from his brain. Like he’d been poked with a cattle prod, he threw his hands into the air above his head, so high he bumped the stick he’d been setting in place when the barn doors burst open and the world exploded. The end of the stick laden with marijuana slid off the rail and dropped on top of him.
Gabe tried to maintain his balance, but there was nothing to grab, nothing to hold onto. He felt himself falling backwards, reaching out frantically for something, anything, listening to the wail of his own scream mixed with the song that was now blaring out of the radio as he plummeted 25 feet down to the barn floor.
The song was the new Bobby McFerrin hit Don’t Worry, Be Happy.
Gabe actually heard the crack when the back of his head struck the concrete, heard his skull fracture, then he didn’t hear anything else at all.
Chapter 7
“You sure that wasn’t the turn?” Ben asked.
Sarabeth looked over her shoulder at the road they had just passed. “I don’t think so. I think it’s up ahead. I was here a couple of times with Daddy but it’s hard to remember turns when you’re not driving.”
She’d started the day with her mind muddled, hazy like the knobs looked on summer mornings when it was going to be hot. When she’d awakened before dawn, it was like she could hear a faint buzz, a dial tone, somewhere deep in her skull. The Saran Wrap on her eyes seemed triple thickness and there was a too-tight girdle pulled up snug around the base of her skull.
So she’d asked Ben, “Wanna drive me to Elsie Bingo after lunch?” Like a 16-year-old boy didn’t have better things to do on a Saturday afternoon.
And he’d said, “Sure.”
Truth was, he hadn’t made any friends yet and really didn’t have anything better to do.
She stared at his profile, the lush Kentucky woodlands a green blur behind him. He looked so much like their mother. And since she did, too, it wasn’t surprising people thought he was her son. Though he wasn’t, he had helped fill the gaping hollowness inside her when her own child was ripped out of her arms and carried away.
Ben interrupted her thoughts.
“There, look. Is that the blue bridge you were telling me about?”
Up ahead lay a metal bridge, painted bright blue and as broken out with campaign signs and bumper stickers as a teenager with zits. If volume was any indication, Michael Dukakis was a shoe-in in Callison County. His “New Season, New Leader” slogans out-numbered the Bush/Quayle “Kinder, Gentler Nation” stickers 3-to1.
“That’s it. It’s just a little way past the bridge.”
“That thing’s only wide enough for one car. What happens if two cars going opposite directions get to it at the same time?”
Sarabeth shrugged. “Play chicken, I guess. The school’s down from that church on the left. I think that’s where the festival is.” When she pointed, her finger shook. Ben saw it and shot her a concerned look. She was grateful he didn’t say anything.
People had parked in the church lot and a small army of men, women and little kids streamed past the pickups, cars and farm trucks lining both sides of the road all the way to the school. Fifty yards from the entrance, a bright red pickup pulled out just as they arrived and Ben snapped up the parking place. Sarabeth was profoundly grateful. Her legs felt rubbery. She didn’t know how far she’d be able to walk, and it was already hot.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” Ben asked as she shoved her car door shut.
She fit her camera bag strap around her neck and held out her hand. “Keys.”
“Aw, come on—”
“You’ll lose them. Keys.”
He dropped the car keys into her palm and she deposited them in the side pocket of her bag.
“I told you everything I know about it. This festival is an annual fund-raiser. The fire departments and rescue squads in these little communities are manned by volunteers, and Bear Claw uses the proceeds from booth rentals and food sales to pay for their equipment. But I don’t have any idea what Elsie Bingo might be.”
She slipped her arm through his. “What do you say we go find out? You solve the mystery first, I’ll split it with you.”
“Split what?”
“The mega-bucks I get paid for investigative journalism.” Her brother didn’t appear to notice that she leaned on him slightly as they walked away from the car.
The festival had set up shop behind the school building, on the ball fields and in the parking lot. By the time they made their way around the side of the gymnasium, the feeling had returned to Sarabeth’s legs and she dropped Ben’s arm and plunged headlong into the crowd of at least 5,000 people.
It was a scorcher, maybe 95 degrees. Sarabeth wondered if the heat would bring on MS symptoms. Sometimes it did; sometimes it didn’t.
Welcome to my crap-shoot life.
The awnings attached to canvas-covered booths afforded the only available shade. Set in rows with mini “streets” between them, they formed a village in the parking lot, offering hand-made wares of every imaginable sort from Christmas ornaments to statues carved out of coal.
Sarabeth had been struggling to regain the 20 pounds she’d lost in the past eight months because of daily, low-grade nausea, probably caused by the megatron doses of vitamins and mineral supplements the doctor in Singapore had recommended. But when the wind wafted her way the combined aroma of smoky grilled hotdogs, buttery pop corn, fluffy pink cotton candy and hot funnel cakes topped with powdered sugar, she was struck by a sudden, ravenous hunger. She followed the most appealing scent like a hound dog tracking a rabbit and soon stood beside a huge grill where two dozen chickens slathered in sweet bourbon barbecue sauce dripped juice onto a bed of red-hot charcoal.
“You look like you haven’t had anything to eat since the last time there was a Democrat in the White House.” A tall man with black hair and matching eyes reached out his meat fork and turned a whole row of chicken carcasses, one after another, with the expert skill of a career short-order cook. “Can I interest you in one of these? Or half a dozen?”
“If they taste as good as they smell!”
Ben stepped up behind her and made sniffing sounds in her ear. “I smell pizza!” he said. “Meet you … ” He looked around and spotted a make-shift stage sitting at home plate on the baseball field. “… in front of the stage in fifteen minutes.” He turned and vanished into the crowd.
Sarabeth’s sudden appetite vanished just as quickly and she wondered idly if people with MS ever starved to death.
She looked up into the smiling face of the tall cook and shook her head sadly. “No, thanks,” she said, then turned and walked away.
Ben joined her at the stage just as an old man with a deeply lined bloodhound face hobbled with a cane out onto the stage. He was wearing a scraggly straw hat and coveralls so worn it was hard to tell their original color. The man stepped up to the microphone, smiled a toothless grin, dropped his cane and put a beat-up fiddle under his chin. He raked the bow across the strings a time or two, making a raucous, set-your-teeth-on-edge sound. He stomped his foot four times as a lead-in, then began to belt out Cotton-Eyed Joe.
As the crowd stood in stunned silence, the fiddle sang, wailed, barked and cried. The listeners began to sway with the music. They clapped their hands to the beat and exploded in thunderous applause when he finished.
Sarabeth fired away with her father’s old metal Nikon, the sweat in her eyes making it hard to focus sometimes. She froze the blur of the bow at a thousandth of a second, captured the old fellow’s knobby, callused fingers and his eyes buried in a spider web of smile wrinkles.
Turkey in the Straw followed. And when the fiddler ripped out The Devil Went Down to Georgia, Ben jumped up and down beside her cheering.
She left her brother at the fiddling contest and wandered around shooting other events, planning out the section front she’d fill with photos, imagining that she might even use color if she could get Beverly to show her how to make color separations.
She even shot the tobacco-spitting contest, froze it “on the fly” so to speak.
Note to self: Next year, wear closed-toe shoes.
So far, the only heat symptom Sarabeth felt was sweat, dripping down her flushed face. She should have worn sunscreen. In fact, as the day wore on, she felt more and more like her old self. Her appetite returned and she wolfed down two hot dogs, fries and half a funnel cake before a voice squealed and squawked through the PA system.
“It’s time for the maaaaaain event, folks. Make your way to the center pen. We’ll be starting Elsie Bingo in 10 minutes.”
The two followed the crowd to a fenced-in area on the far side of the baseball diamond. Sarabeth climbed up and sat on the top rail and had just gotten settled when somebody pinched her—square on the butt! She turned in a rage, ready to cold cock whoever it was, only to find a grinning Billy Joe!
“You varmit! That hurt!”
“Awww. Poor baby. Payback, Bessie, my love. Payback! The time you tripped me, remember? Dumped me face-first into a cow patty.” His twin dimples were deep enough to eat pudding out of. “I think ’bout that every year at Elsie Bingo.”
Ben recognized his sister’s cousin from the funeral home. “Ok, I give. Will you please tell me what Elsie Bingo is?”
A teenage girl stepped out from behind Billy Joe. “It’s a dumb game, that’s what it is. Totally stupid.” She turned to her father. “Do we have to stay here? Can’t we go now?”
Billy Joe pushed his UK cap back on his head and put his arm around the girl’s shoulders. “My daughter, Kelsey,” he said to Sarabeth, then turned back to the girl. “You’ve heard me talk about my cousin, haven’t you Kells?”
“Don’t. Call. Me. Kells!”
“And this is her brother Ben …”
“Malone.” Ben put in.
“My baby girl’s all grown up now. Last time you saw her was when you were here right after graduation and she was a little bitty thing.”
Sarabeth figured it was a safe bet Ben had picked up on the “all grown up” part, given the “little bitty thing” the teenage girl was wearing: a skimpy, low-cut tan
k top and a tight spandex mini-skirt. Bracelets, both bangles and jellies, extended from her wrists half way up both arms and she wore a white-lace, fingerless Madonna glove on her left hand.
My mother would have thrown a bathrobe over me if I’d ever tried to leave the house dressed like that!
Kelsey’s electric-blue eyes glared sullenly at the world through layered black eye-liner and thick mascara. Two huge rocks hung from her ears, sparkling pendant earrings at least three carats each if they’d been real diamonds. The overall effect was less an outfit than a costume.
After a grunted, monosyllabic greeting, the girl fell silent, but her gloom was instantly eclipsed by the exuberant cheeriness of the little girl who appeared out of nowhere and crashed into Billy Joe like a runner sliding into home plate.
“Daddy, gimme some money, quick!” The child was out of breath and her words whistled through a wide gap in the front of her mouth where she was missing key teeth. “I wanna win a teddy bear and I gotta have a quarter, lotsa quarters, ’cause all’s you have to do is get a ring over some milk bottles and they give you a teddy bear!”
She had golden curls and dimples even deeper than her father’s.
“Bethy, honey, I want you to meet Sarabeth and Ben.”
“Gladtomeetcha.” She fired a smile Sarabeth’s way and Sarabeth felt Billy Joe’s spark in the child.
I bet her eyes twinkle.
“Give me a whole buncha quarters, Daddy, so I can win!”
“Bethany, those games are rigged,” Kelsey told her. “They’ll just take your money and you won’t win anything. You can get a teddy bear in the Bardstown Wal-Mart twice the size of those scrawny things.” She cocked her head toward her father and sneered. “Just ask Daddy, he’ll buy you …” She stopped, like she was finished, then completed the sentence. “ … anything you want.”
Billy Joe began to dig around for change in his pockets, not looking at Sarabeth. “Let’s see how many quarters I got, Sweet Pea.”
“You both got hair the same color.” Bethany was looking from Ben to Sarabeth, squinting up into the sun. “Did your mommy give you your red hair? My mommy gived me my hair. It’s golden.”