"It's my leg, isn't it?” he said bitterly. “You liked me fine when I was in one piece."
"I still care for you. I always will,” she said, cupping his cheek with her palm, then letting it fall. “Take Russo's blood money, Luke, start fresh somewhere else. Have a good life."
"Damn, Frankie, don't go away mad,” he called after her. And she knew if she looked back he'd be wearing that devilish grin.
So she didn't look back. She didn't dare.
* * * *
Five weeks later, after a twenty-minute hearing behind closed doors, a judge accepted Luke's guilty plea and sentenced him to serve two and a half years in a prison downstate. For a crime he didn't commit. Leaving the LaRoche clan to bury their dead, while Frankie struggled to reassemble the wreckage of her life. Without Luke. Again.
The first week was the toughest. She was utterly miserable. She'd be talking to a client or treating a pet, suddenly find herself back in that horrible clearing with Virgil's half-buried body. Hearing a buffalo bawling in the distance. Dying in the dark.
She tried to think her way through it, to put the tragedy into perspective and find some kind of closure. But she just couldn't do it. Until she finally faced the ugly truth.
There couldn't be any closure. Not yet. Because it wasn't over.
It was all too unfair, on every level. Three LaRoche brothers were dead and buried in the ground.
Luke Sevier was as good as buried, too, locked in a cage of concrete and steel in Jackson Prison.
The only ones who came through the disaster unmarked were Vic Russo and his thug nephew. Russo rebuilt the fence around the Buffalo Country taller than before, topping it with gleaming rings of bayonet wire. The wounded bison were butchered or shot for trophies, then quickly replaced with fresh stock.
In a few weeks, Buffalo Country was back in business, as though nothing had happened. Russo was as untouchable as any emperor of old, safe and secure in his splendid manor house on the grounds of his killing farm. Where his fat-cat clients were free to resume the slaughter of the buffalo at ten grand a pop.
The injustice of it was simply more than Frankie could bear. It gnawed at her soul, keeping her awake nights.
She would lay there in the dark, unable to sleep, afraid to dream. Racking her brain, trying to come up with a solution. With no luck.
Until she happened to step in it. Literally.
A Labrador pup left a steaming deposit in her waiting room, which she discovered by accident. But as she was outside hosing the dog doo off her work boots, she stopped, frozen by a faint flicker of memory. Of a similar mess. Seen in the glare of a flashlight beam.
She didn't understand the connection at first.
The next morning, she was up at dawn, driving her Jeep down an abandoned logging trail in the state forest woodlands. After concealing the Jeep, she shouldered an empty backpack and set off on a long, circuitous trek. A snake with a broken back couldn't have followed her route, but Frankie'd grown up in these woods and knew exactly where she was going.
Two hours of hard hiking brought her to the burned-out pot field and Virgil LaRoche's empty grave. Kneeling a moment, she said a brief prayer for the lost boy whose death had caused so much havoc, then set to work.
Circling the fire-blackened clearing, she began gathering up dried lumps of buffalo dung, but only those left behind by the blinded buff who'd raided the marijuana field. His scat was easy to spot. It was speckled, flecked with undigested seeds.
After filling her knapsack, Frankie hiked along the perimeter fence on the back side of the Buffalo Country. Choosing her sites carefully, she began chucking fistfuls of seeded dung over the bayonet wire, where it landed soundlessly, scattering over the moist green earth.
By the end of the long day, she was covered with mud and mosquito bites and smeared with buffalo dung. And filled with a sense of grim satisfaction.
As the summer wore on, she made two more trips to check on her handiwork. Fertilized by the rich dung, the marijuana seeds quickly took root and shot up like the weeds they are, undisturbed and undiscovered, far from the game trails and baited shooting blinds where Russo's clients played at their savage sport.
In the second week of September, after a final hike to be sure the marijuana stalks were tall enough, Frankie dialed up Sheriff Wolinski and gave him precise directions to the sprawling marijuana patches inside the fence in the remote corners of Buffalo Country.
The day of the bust, she parked across the road from the game farm, sipping coffee from a thermos, watching as the FBI and the local sheriff's department conducted a joint raid, hauling Vic Russo, his nephew, and a dozen clients out of the posh clubhouse in handcuffs.
Perhaps it wasn't entirely fair. Growing reefer was one of the few crimes Russo hadn't actually committed, but she could live with that. He was guilty of far worse. Drugs and prostitution and murder. And bribing a wounded backwoods boy who'd lost his leg and most of his soul fighting for his country.
But for Frankie, Russo's greatest crime was the Buffalo Game Farm itself. Raising animals for the depraved pleasure of slaughtering them is a capital crime against the planet. And this Earth is the only one we have.
She warned Russo that first day, and he laughed at her.
But she wasn't joking.
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Doug Allyn
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Fiction: THE ROAD TO THE AIRPORT by Donna Thorland
* * * *
Anthony Mullen
* * * *
"We're not going to make it."
"We'll make it."
Frank says this kind of thing because Frank always makes it. Frank makes things happen. He doesn't have to get places on time, hustle for jobs, work at things the way I have to. He's Frank. The world bends to accommodate him.
"I told you to get me up.” I hear the words leave my mouth, and I know already how childish they sound.
"I set the alarm."
"It's not enough. I can't get up with just the alarm. You have to wake me,” I tell him, certain I've said it a thousand times before.
We're only twenty minutes from the airport if you take the highway. Twenty minutes, maybe less, because it's four in the morning, and no one else is on the road. But we don't have twenty minutes. Not the way security is now.
"You know I don't like to do that. If you want to get up, you'll get up,” Frank tells me. And that's true, for him. If Frank wants to be awake, he breaks from the confines of our bed and strides into the day, alert, adroit, refreshed, while I struggle toward consciousness from beneath an engulfing wave of sleep, tangled in sheets like seaweed, drowning in the cool dark.
"You've missed the ramp.” I see it flash past us, and watch it recede into the distance, like my chances of catching this plane, landing this job. And then it's gone.
"We'll make it. There's an access road up here that runs straight across the meadow. It's got to cut the trip in half.” He says this with such confidence that I believe him, until we turn, smooth asphalt sailing into waves of chop gravel.
There's a gate barring the road. Our headlights slice across it and reveal the opening to be wide enough for a car to fit through.
"It's not even paved,” I point out.
"It is—ahead,” Frank insists.
"Have you ever come this way before? Do you even know where this leads?"
"I've always meant to try it."
The road smooths out and we're floating again over placid, unblemished tarmac.
"This isn't the time for an experiment.” I want this to be Frank's fault, even though I know it isn't. “I'll miss my plane."
Once, when it was my birthday, Frank ordered me a chocolate cake from the bakery down the street. When we went to pick it up, the baker had lost Frank's order. He hadn't made a chocolate cake.
Check again, Frank told him. Check in the back.
I didn't make any chocolate cakes.
It's o
kay, I told Frank. It didn't have to be chocolate.
Your cake is chocolate, Frank had insisted.
The baker returned a moment later with a chocolate cake. The world works like that for Frank.
"If you miss it, then it wasn't your plane,” Frank says, simple as that, but I can tell by the way he scans the road that for once he isn't certain.
We're driving across a meadow, or a swamp, it's difficult to tell which in the light, the terrain rising on either side of us into flanking dunes, forming like clay beneath a child's hands. It looks just like all the land surrounding every airport. It's scrubby, undeveloped, empty, with a constant nimbus of yellow light just on the horizon indicating the vast expanse of the runways. Useless land that no one travels, no one lives on.
We're going east, or must be, because the airport is east. And the sky should be lightening with the dawn, but it isn't. I turn in my seat, to see the sulfur yellow glow of the highway disappear. Ahead we're traveling into blue gloom, into night, which is just plain wrong.
"We're going the wrong way. It should be getting lighter, not darker. We should be heading east to the airport, into the sunrise."
"The road probably twists and jogs around the runways."
"What runways?"
For the first time since I have known him, Frank does not have the answer.
Suddenly we're traveling uphill, and we emerge from between the scrubby dunes into something else entirely.
It's nothing like an access road to an airport: too manicured, landscaped, terraced, to be anyplace near the airport. High, fine curbs border perfect rolling grass hills dotted with street lamps, their pendant globes bright white in the blue gloom.
"This can't be between our house and the airport. We must be going the wrong way."
"We can't be driving away from the airport.” Frank is confident, assured. “We'd have crossed back over the highway, and we haven't."
His reasoning is faultless, but nothing feels right. The blue light outside has drenched the car, inside and out, tinting every surface a shade of blue. My hands, cyanotic; my pants, my bag, all blue. The manicured, rolling lawns stretching as far as the eye can see are blue as well; a world floored with sky.
And it's getting cold.
Overhead are highway signs, blank white staring slabs mounted on steel posts.
"The signs are blank. Let's turn around. Let's go back.” My voice sounds shrill and far away.
"This must be a new development."
It's an excellent explanation, but wrong.
"Then there wouldn't be signs at all. No one hangs blank signs."
"We'll never make it on time if we turn back.” Frank pats my knee, but I can't feel the warmth of his hand. “We've made a decision, and now we're committed to it. We'll keep following the road and we'll hit the airport."
That's when it starts snowing. I try to think of a late April snow shower in recent memory but can't. The lawns now appear frosted, and the trees are spangled with pale blue ice. I close my eyes because I don't want to see any more. I'm convinced we've driven out of the real world and into someplace else.
I'm jolted awake when the car stops moving. I expect to open my eyes to the concrete ramps and car exhaust of the departing flights level, but the world is still blue, still icy crisp and oddly new.
"Why have we stopped?"
"To ask directions."
The road ahead is forked and the white staring signs are silent above.
Frank rolls my window down, and I see him. There is a man standing on the grass. He looks lost. White-blond hair, tinted cobalt by the strange dawn light, frames a sharp nose and vacant, anthracite eyes.
He's dressed for the wrong climate: short pants and T-shirt, with thick-soled canvas shoes, all dyed blue by the light. He's carrying a skateboard in his hand, hanging low at his side.
"Which road to the airport?” Frank calls out.
"Just drive.” I say it quietly.
The man on the grass looks up at the white signs and back down to us.
"Please drive. There's something wrong here.” I start sliding my window up, but Frank slides it back down.
The man begins to cross the lawn, slow, dreamlike, the skateboard dragging a furrow in the frozen grass.
When he reaches the car he collapses like a released marionette to crouch at my window, all stiffness gone from his frame. There's frost on his eyelashes. He looks like a frozen corpse, but when he speaks his voice is bathetic, full of the round stoner vowels of the West Coast, languid, helpful, mundane.
"Take the left fork, dude, to the airport. That way.” He points.
Frank thanks him. We drive away. I look back and he is still crouched at the curb. I catch a glimpse of that curb in the mirror, and he is gone, just as the dim blue world erupts into pink and yellow light. My ears pop, as though we've changed altitude, and everything sounds louder and clearer. Ahead is the road, the airport.
Gravel spins once more under our tires before we make contact with the surface of the main road. We shoot past ramps and terminals and are inside, breathless at the check-in before I can find my wallet, identification, tickets.
Most of the counters are still closed. The tiny, sleepy airlines don't fly this early. There's a sealed-off silence in here, a world apart from the windy ramps outside. We're long past my boarding time, but there's a chance that the plane hasn't left.
Even for the hour, though, my counter is unusually subdued. Frank has gone to park while I make my mad dash for the gate, nursing hope, though it feels likely my journey will end here, at the check-in counter. The ticket agents talk in whispers, examine my identification over and over, huddle to confer in low tones I can't make out.
I interrupt their conference. “If I've missed my flight, can you put me on another? Maybe with another airline? I've got an interview."
The ticket agent who breaks away from the group to speak with me has a funereal air about her. I'm not going to make it to this interview.
"I'm sorry,” she tells me, “but there's been an accident on the runway. With your plane. It happened about fifteen minutes ago, during take-off. We don't know when the next flights will be cleared."
"What kind of accident?” I ask, but I've already guessed the answer.
There's a light, empty space in my stomach, spreading up through my body. Fifteen minutes ago, Frank was driving me endlessly through a twilight landscape, somewhere between our home and the airport. Somewhere I don't think I could find again.
The doors behind me hiss open, and I know without turning that it's Frank.
"Would you like us to call you when we know something?"
I thank them and follow Frank back out to the car. He says nothing as we drive. We take the highway this time, and though I search, I do not see the entrance to the service road we traveled.
It occurs to me as the car speeds along that there is no service road cutting across the meadows. The world bends to accommodate Frank. He wanted a shortcut to the airport, just like he wanted a chocolate cake for my birthday, and one appeared. He bent the world around him.
Later, at home during the long morning, I feel like an unexpected guest in Frank's planned, solitary day. In the afternoon I begin to wonder if Frank really did make the long, undulating road through the blue hills, or if, for the first time in a life of certainty, he found himself lost. I begin to wonder if he created not the meandering shortcut through the meadow, but the steep descent and fiery destination of the plane I would have, should have boarded.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Donna Thorland
[Back to Table of Contents]
Fiction: DEATH ROW by Michael Z. Lewin
* * * *
Hank Blaustein
* * * *
"But it's my only chance,” Morrison said. “It's my last chance."
Katy drank from her pint. Then she shook her head slowly, dismissively. “What do you need to be on television for anyway? I've never been on television. I don't feel less a person becaus
e of it."
"You'd avoid being on the telly, if what you've been telling me all these years is true."
"Oh, it's true all right.” She dropped her eyes. “And I can't even tell you most of it."
"So you always say,” Morrison said. He finished his own pint as Katy's head snapped up, a frown on her face. “And I'm not disbelieving you. I'm not. You've lived one hell of a life. One that would put most men to shame. One that puts me to shame. But that's not the point. The point is that here I am, seventy-eight years old, and I've never been on the television and now I got a chance and all I'm asking for is a little help."
"A little help is what you call it?” Katy rubbed her face.
"It'll be like riding a bike,” Morrison said. His wry expression silently added, “if what you've been telling me all these years is true."
"I still don't get why it's so damned important to you."
"It's television,” Morrison said. “It's the modern age. Everything is on the telly. Everybody is on the telly. You're nothing if you haven't been on telly. Unless, of course, it's your personal choice. But my grandkids, I can tell by the way they look at me, they think I'm a slug because their mother thinks I'm a slug, but if suddenly, there I was, on the TV, then that'd all change. There'd be some respect in their eyes. I've been waiting all my life to see some respect in my grandkids’ eyes."
"Your grandchildren are twenty-two and twenty-eight, Mo. And when was the last time you even spoke to the twenty-eight-year-old?"
"Okay, Colin's a DJ or impresario or whatever queer thing he's went and made himself. But there's little Becky."
"Who has two kids of her own and lives in a council house."
"So maybe it's my great-grandkids I want some respect from."
"When's the last time you saw them?"
"If I was going to be on the telly I could call Becky up, tell her when, visit her. Maybe we could watch it together with the greats. It could be the start of a whole new phase of my life. I could be a real grandfather to these ones. I could teach them things. I could tell them stories. And they'd listen because they could tell their friends, That's my great-granddad and he was on the TV news."
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