Robbie spent that same evening in the barn, ignoring Myra’s criticism and Junior’s bullying while he worked out chords on his guitar.
Love your neighbor
As you love yourself.
Jesus taught us this.
Jesus taught us this.
I love my neighbor.
Her hair is like bronze,
Soft bronze,
Living bronze.
It moves in the breeze,
Shines in the sun.
I love my neighbor.
Her breasts are like pomegranates.
It says in the Song of Songs
My love’s breasts are small and perfect
Like twin—
Like twin what? He couldn’t come up with an image beautiful enough to describe Lara’s breasts. And then Junior grabbed his guitar and threatened to break it if Robbie didn’t get in the house to help Myra with the washing-up.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at college?” Robbie demanded, uselessly trying to pull his guitar away from Junior.
Junior punched him in the gut. “Aren’t you supposed to mind your elders, twerp? Get in there or I’ll snap this little piece of junk in half.”
Robbie went sullenly inside, where Nanny lectured him for half an hour on his bad attitude. On the weekend, he couldn’t get away from her until late on Sunday. This was partly due to the crowds. Even though Global Entertainment and Fox and the rest of big media had lost interest in the story, Nasya the miracle calf was still hot news on fundamentalist Christian and Jewish blogs. This meant there were long lines at Nasya’s enclosure every Saturday and Sunday; Nanny figured they cleared almost twenty-five hundred on the weekends, after you subtracted the expenses of maintaining the property.
When Robbie finally got away, he and Lara drove her truck into town. They went to the park on the north side of the Kaw River, with its bike trail that ran the seventy miles between Kansas City and Topeka. To their dismay, it seemed as though everyone in Douglas County was there—the kids making out, the adults walking their dogs. Even Kimberly Ropes, Lara’s best friend, was there; the girls smiled weakly at each other, each chagrined to be caught with a boy who she’d never mentioned to the other.
At school the next day, Kimberly asked Lara what she’d been doing with Robbie. “Winding him up,” Lara grinned. “I thought it might be fun to see how far the milkman would go if he thought he had a chance, but he was completely pathetic, as you might imagine. What were you doing with Kevin?”
“We—I think we’re going to the homecoming dance together. Want to double-date?”
“Who with?” Lara hooted. “Not the milkman, that’s for sure!”
That seemed to satisfy Kimberly, to Lara’s relief: she and Robbie couldn’t afford for whispers around the high school to filter back to Robbie’s family. In the halls, the two acted as though they barely knew each other, and in the two classes they shared, biology and Spanish, they sat as far away from each other as possible, so aware of one another that they heard nothing of the class around them.
Desire made Lara inventive. The old Fremantle barn stood in back of the apple trees, about a hundred yards from the ruin of the bunkhouse. During the two years that she and Chip had treated the place as their private clubhouse, Lara had always hated the barn because of the spiders. There were snakes up there, too, but she had never minded them; they chased away the rats who scrabbled for old bits of grain wedged in cracks along the floor joists.
After school, she drove her truck past Fremantles’, pretending she was heading to Jim’s river acres, and scanned their yard. Gina’s battered Escort stood near the door. Lara waited until six, but Gina never emerged. The next day, Lara was luckier: when she got home from school, Gina was gone. There was no sign of Elaine, either.
Robbie was doing the afternoon milking, so Lara worked alone. She drove her truck through the apple orchard to park behind the barn. If Gina came home before she finished, Lara would just have to trust to her luck to get off the property unseen.
The Fremantles had never turned off the water tap in the barn, and there were working electric outlets. Lara hooked up a length of flex cord and brought up a work light and a big push broom. Using a leaf blower, she forced most of the spiders out of the rafters. In October, snakes were giving birth; a garter snake had left a family in a corner that she tried not to disturb. The rest of the loft she swept and scrubbed. It was a drag, carrying water up and down the ladder, but by the end of the afternoon she had it pretty well cleaned.
She brought up Chip’s sleeping bag, provisions like juice and Fig Newtons in a rat-proof metal hamper, and a flashlight, and still managed to leave before Gina returned. Susan was in the family room, staring into space. Jim was busy somewhere on the land.
On an impulse, Lara ran up to the second floor. She pulled on the rope that opened the hatch to the attic, bringing down the stairs folded up inside it, and fetched down the old tin trunk that held Abigail’s diaries. She tiptoed down the stairs, hoping to avoid her mother, but she needn’t have worried, she realized bitterly: Susan acted as though Lara didn’t exist. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! she yelled inside her head.
Lara drove back to the Fremantle house. Gina’s car was still gone. She didn’t want to put the trunk in the barn, where rain might leak onto it. She surveyed the locked house. The second-floor bathroom offered her best chance for entry. She put the trunk by the kitchen door and shinnied up one of the pillars on the veranda that circled the house. Yes, Pocahontas Grellier, mistress of the mountains and the plains, has no trouble scaling this cliff, which daunts the white settlers like Eddie Burton!
The bathroom window was unlocked. Careless, Gina, very careless, Lara mouthed, slipping inside. She ran down the back stairs, unlocked the kitchen door, and brought in the trunk. It was too big to fit into the niche in the fireplace where she used to stow her own diary. She went through the connecting closet to the northeast bedroom and stowed Abigail’s trunk in the bedroom closet, under the limp graying prom dress that hung on the door. She was just pulling out of the Fremantle drive when Gina’s Escort turned east from the county road. She waved at Gina as they passed: perky farm girl, on her way home from the river.
On Wednesday afternoon, when Myra ordered him to go to town for Teen Witness, Robbie and Lara finally met in the Fremantles’ hayloft. It was a tough trek for both of them. Since all the crops were down, if they’d gone across fields someone would have spotted them; Myra would have heard three seconds later and come after Robbie with a large-gauge shotgun. By the same token, they couldn’t drive their pickups down the road and park—Jim might choose that very moment to inspect his river-bottom acres.
Instead, they hiked through the rough undergrowth in the drainage ditches, where the prairie grasses stood higher than the tallest man’s head. The ditch bottoms were muddy and filled with every kind of garbage that humans could think to toss, from car parts to condoms. They had to go past the bunkhouse and approach the barn from behind, slipping in through a board that Robbie had loosened, and then quickly climbing up the old ladder to the hayloft. At least for Lara, half the pleasure of meeting in the loft was the excitement of evading detection as they came and went.
She didn’t tell Robbie that. Nor did she reveal another part of her reason for meeting at Fremantles’: she wanted to check up on her father. She and Robbie were exchanging almost every secret their families had, but she couldn’t put into words, even to herself, her suspicion, her fear, that her father had slept with Gina after rescuing her from the bunkhouse.
Lara wanted to keep Jim under her eye to make sure he didn’t do anything dreadful—although what she would do if she saw his truck pull into the yard she hadn’t imagined. The stroking, touching, moaning she and Robbie did didn’t count as sex, in her mind. Sex would mean pulling Chip’s packet of Hot Rods out of her jeans pocket and persuading Robbie to put one on. She wasn’t ready for that, and neither was Robbie, not after all the mauling he’d seen his brother and Eddie
go through.
She and Robbie could never stay together very long. Jim would start phoning Lara around six-thirty, but more worrying was the effort Myra Schapen was putting into finding out where Robbie was going. And it took them so long to hike through the ditches and out to the barn that in the end they only spent a short hour together.
“Nanny can’t be happy with success, she can only be happy if she finds out I’m a fuckup.” Robbie’s language became coarser when he was with Lara; it was part of the sense of freedom he had when he was with her, breaking all of Myra’s taboos in one delicious outing.
“I mean, we’re getting so much free publicity from all the news stories, plus YouTube and blogs and everything, that we’re getting milk orders from Christian wholesalers all over the country,” he went on. “We don’t have a big enough herd, or a big enough plant, to pasteurize and ship milk to those places, but Nanny and Dad upped our per-gallon price by almost five percent anyway, even for our oldest customers.
“Of course, Mrs. Wieser was really upset. She came over to meet with Nanny and Dad, and said her cheese business was what had kept us afloat all these years, that she should get to keep her old rate. And she’s right. Nanny told her to take it or leave it. Mrs. Wieser took it, but I think she’s looking for another supplier—there’s a guy near Topeka who can supply her with raw organic milk, same as us. But if Nassie turns out to be a dud, we’ll be totally screwed. I tried to say to Nanny that we ought to honor our commitment to the Wiesers, but Nanny whacked me on the head and told me I wasn’t a true Schapen and all the rest of that crap.”
Lara nodded soberly, not at Myra’s insult but the economic worry. Like Robbie, she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known to a penny what it cost to run the family farm.
“Anyway,” Robbie added, “Nanny is desperate to find out where I’m going after the afternoon milking. Not to mention how she is so on my case about going to Teen Witness with Amber.”
Lara giggled again and bit Robbie in the neck. “Tell her you’re with a vampire. Tell her you have too much respect for Amber to infect her with vampire blood.”
She bit him again. He yelped, and they scuffled happily for several minutes.
“Lucky for me it’s football season or she’d have Junior chained to me like a prison guard,” Robbie said a little later. “He tried to follow me this afternoon, but I was too fast for him, and he had to get back to the school—he missed football practice yesterday, and his grades aren’t good enough that they’ll let him keep his scholarship if he keeps missing practice. But I think he told Eddie to spy for him. So, Lulu, we really have to be careful.”
Lara agreed, more readily than Robbie thought she would. She was more courageous than him, or at least more willing to take risks, but Junior and Eddie in the heifer’s shed had frightened her badly enough that she didn’t want to court the disaster of them coming on her and Robbie.
“We can cool it for a day or two,” Robbie said. “I’ll go to my youth group tomorrow. Maybe we could get together Saturday: I think Nanny’s going to leave Mrs. Ruesselmann in charge so Dad and her can drive over to Tonganoxie Bible to watch Junior play.”
“Three days,” Lara said.
They clung to each other, trying to ward off the impending separation. And then it turned out Robbie couldn’t even get away on Saturday because Arnie kept him hopping all afternoon. They didn’t meet again until Monday evening. After four days’ separation, they melted together. They clung to each other in Chip’s sleeping bag, whispering, stroking, not caring how late they were.
When she got home at eight, after ignoring Jim’s calls to her cell phone, Jim told Lara she was grounded for two weeks and that he was going to enforce it.
As for Robbie, even though he always left the Schapen farm on foot when he slipped off to see Lara, Myra was so furious at his late arrival home that she took away his truck keys. She gave them to him in the morning so he could drive to school and then took them away when he was doing the afternoon milking. Since Myra monitored all the phone bills so closely, he and Lara were reduced to using e-mail. At night, when they were supposedly doing homework, or at study hall during the day, they sent each other longing messages, Robbie’s filled with the songs he was writing to her, Lara’s with pictures she had drawn of him or the two of them together. Robbie saved her messages on a flash drive that he kept in his jeans pocket, making sure he erased them from the family machine each night.
Forty-Five
VISITING HOURS
THE ONLY GOOD THING about her and Robbie’s two-week separation, at least in Lara’s mind, was that if Jim had to keep an eye on her, to make sure she was out after school only to go to basketball or band practice, she could keep an eye on him, too. No trips over to Gina’s, at least not after school.
Jim embarrassed her by driving her to and from school; the winter wheat was in, and he wasn’t nearly so busy during the day as he had been all fall. She told her friends that her truck was in the shop and sat sullenly at her father’s side all the way into town. Secretly, she enjoyed the time alone with him, especially after school when they might stop for a coffee at Z’s or at the store, where he let her choose the dinner menu. She’d done a cooking course at 4-H and amused her father with her lectures on nutrition and balanced meals.
One afternoon at Z’s, she asked him, point-blank, if he had been visiting Gina. When he froze before answering, she looked at him from under her lashes as if inviting him to confide in her. “I mean, did she have any terrible aftereffects from the bunkhouse falling on her?”
“Not that I know of, Lulu. You could have asked her yourself when she came over to see your mother.”
Jim tried to speak naturally, but Gina’s visit, which he had longed for, had not been a success, for him or for either of the women. Gina had treated him with the coolness of a stranger when he answered the door, while Susan insisted on receiving Gina in the front room, dressing as if she were a Victorian widow in deep mourning with the Gold Star pin the Army had sent her at her throat.
After letting Gina in through the kitchen, Jim busied himself with farm accounts in the family room. He knew Lara was eavesdropping: he’d seen her crack open the door that connected the parlor to the unused front staircase. Instead of admonishing his daughter, Jim wished he had the nerve to join her.
When Gina said she was sorry for everything Susan had been through, Lara, peering through the crack in the door, watched her mother bow her head like a queen, saying nothing.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you sooner,” Gina said. “I guess I’ve felt helpless.”
“Then you know exactly how I feel,” Susan said.
“We’ll be celebrating Samhain at the end of the month,” Gina said after a pause. “That’s the original Celtic ceremony the Christians took over and turned into Halloween. We’ll make a fire and show Arnie Schapen that he can’t frighten us out of the valley.”
Susan didn’t answer, just sat with her hands folded in her lap.
Gina ploughed on, desperate. “We hope you can join us, Susan. You brought so much good energy to our earlier ceremonies. Even though it marks the end of summer, Samhain is a festival of new beginnings. If you came, perhaps it could be a time for you to make a new beginning as well.”
“Did Jim tell you to deliver this message?” Susan asked.
“No!” Gina was startled. Even from behind the door, Lara could sense her wariness. “But you’re hovering between life and death, and Samhain is the time when the world itself is balanced between life and death. If you come to the festival, you might find yourself ready to choose life again.”
“I see.” Susan’s voice held the dryness of old leaves or old paper. “You’ve done your duty. You’ve visited the sick, and apologized for whatever you imagine your own sins are. You can go now.”
Lara scrambled to her feet and was waiting in the kitchen when Gina left. She watched her father suspiciously for any signs of passion, but he merely came into the kitch
en to thank Gina for being neighborly.
The sight of her had brought desire to the surface, like a sore tooth. Only the awareness of Lara’s sharp gaze made him behave as remotely as Gina did herself. But he drove over to Fremantles’ the next day, after delivering Lara to school, while Susan worked on the endless afghan that her occupational therapist thought would do her good.
Gina met him at the door, gave him her crooked gap-toothed smile, but told him it wasn’t a good idea for him to visit her. “I don’t want to do any more harm to Susan than I already have. And the one thing I’ve learned in my short stay in the home where the buffalo roam is that everyone for miles around is watching the deer and the antelope play. If you keep visiting me, people will notice. Inevitably, one of them will say something to Susan.”
She looked down at her hands, at the long white fingers that roused Jim more than the idea of her body. “I ran into Clem Burton at the drugstore this morning, and he said he’d be glad to come out the next time I was trapped inside a falling building. Elaine probably blabbed it all out at Raider’s Bar—Clem’s uncle Turk drinks there, which means everyone out here knows at least that you pulled me out of the bunkhouse. Let’s not have them start telling each other that you’re neglecting your wife and your farm by visiting the local witch.”
His face burned. He couldn’t say anything because he knew Gina was right, but he pulled her to him, anyway. She let him kiss her but drew away almost at once. As he turned to leave, he saw Elaine Logan in the kitchen, her face alive with malevolence.
After that, Jim was just as glad he’d grounded Lara: driving her back and forth to school gave some shape to his time. That, of course, and taking Susan to her therapy appointments. Settling the bills for September, Jim tried to believe Susan’s therapy was helping her.
Bleeding Kansas Page 37