Mark climbed on the running board and held on to the grab bar.
“What do you think you’re doing, Sailor Boy?”
“Hitching a ride with the prettiest girl in Texas.”
“I don’t think OSHA would approve.”
“Mark, OSHA went out of business years ago.”
“Good point.”
“And I did call you the prettiest girl in Texas.”
“And you think that’s enough?”
“The prettiest girl in the country?”
“Better.”
“The prettiest girl in the world?”
“Now you’re talking. Hang on, Sailor Boy.”
-23-
The following morning they walked Markie to the one-room school house after breakfast.
“What are y’all doing today?” their son asked.
“We’re going back to that trailer we were going through yesterday to see if we can finish it up today.”
“What are you looking for? Maybe when I get out of school I can come and help.”
Hannah did something she seldom did.
She lied.
Oh, it was a little white lie. And she had a reason for doing it.
But Markie saw right through her.
Because he knew something she didn’t know.
His mom really sucked at lying.
It wasn’t her fault. She just did it so seldom she never really had a chance to get good at it.
“Oh, we’re not really looking for something specific,” she lied. “We’re just going through the trailer to see what’s in it, that’s all.”
Markie knew she wasn’t telling the truth. He could tell by the slightly-anguished look on her face. And the fact she turned her face and looked away as she spoke.
He decided to push a bit farther.
“Good. Then after I get out of school I’ll come find you and help you. It sounds like it might be fun, digging through those trailers.”
“No. We can handle it. Besides, there are spiders back there. I don’t want you to get bit.”
Now Markie knew for sure his mom was lying.
Markie knew his dad was deathly afraid of spiders. If there were spiders anywhere near the trailers Mark Senior would run away, screaming like a little girl.
“Ya’ll are looking for something to give me for my birthday, aren’t you?”
The gig was up.
Hannah’s ruse was discovered.
She was busted.
She said, “You just don’t worry about what we’re doing, young man. You just go to school and do your work. And you stay away from those trailers, understand?”
Markie grinned.
“Yes, ma’am.”
When they got to the schoolhouse and Hannah kissed him on the forehead, he told her, “Mom, no more model cars.”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want any more model cars for my birthday. I’m tired of putting together model cars and airplanes.”
“Duly noted.”
“And for crying out loud, no more clothes, either. Aunt Sarah and Uncle Bryan always give me clothes. I can walk over to the supply room and pick out all the clothes I need.”
“Duly noted. Anything else?”
“No. I suppose not.”
She turned to walk away but Mark wasn’t finished.
“Markie, remind me later and I’ll show you something fun to do with those model airplanes.”
Markie’s eyebrow went up.
“Um… okay. Sure.”
Hannah and Mark continued on their way to the forklift, which Hannah had parked in the water plant bay to get it out of the main aisle.
“I saw the twinkle in your eye. What have you got planned for his model airplanes?”
“You remember I told you once that when Bryan and I were kids we used to build model airplanes and then hang them from tree branches and shoot them with BB guns?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So one time we ran out of BBs. But we had some Black Cat firecrackers.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, but we did. We did. We taped the firecrackers to the wings and blew the hell out of them.”
“Why would you do that with Markie’s airplanes?”
“Because it’s fun. Markie will think so too. And it’s a bonding experience. We can’t go fishing. And what’s more fun for a father and son to do together than blow stuff up?”
“I can think of lots of things.”
“Shoot, honey. If you had your way we’d learn needlecraft or paint by numbers.
“But Markie and I are manly men. We need to do manly men things together.”
“Like blowing stuff up.”
“Exactly. Now you’re getting it.”
“Yeah. Keep it up and you won’t be getting it for awhile.”
“Now what does that mean?”
“Never mind. What did you and Bryan do with all the airplane pieces?”
“Oh, that’s the beauty of the thing.
“After we blew the planes to bits we pretended we were Air Force mechanics. We pretended we were at war with the Russians and they shot up our planes.
“And then we took all the pieces and glued them together again.”
“I’ll bet they didn’t look as good as they did before you blew them up.”
“Oh, of course not. Many of the parts were shattered.
“But remember, this was all make believe. So it didn’t matter what they looked like.
“We deemed them ready to fly again and sent them back into battle.”
“And let me guess. Then you blew them up again.”
“Of course. What else would we do with them?”
“So what did you do when they were so badly damaged you couldn’t glue them back together anymore?”
“We threw away the pieces and asked our parents to buy some new models.”
“One more question, Sailor. Then I’ll drop the subject because it stopped being worthy of conversation a long time ago.”
“Shoot.”
“Where are you gonna get the firecrackers to blow up Markie’s planes? And how do you know they’ll work after all this time?”
“Oh, I’ve got lots of firecrackers. Hundreds of ‘em. And they should fire. I vacuum sealed them before we came into the mine the first time. Then I vacuum sealed them a second time, just to be sure.
“And I went on the internet. It said that as long as gunpowder isn’t exposed to oxygen it’ll last forever.”
Hannah started to say something, but she’d promised to ask no more questions.
She dropped the subject, but couldn’t stop wondering why it was that some boys never grew up.
-24-
They arrived back at the trailer, Hannah slowly driving the forklift and Mark standing on the running board.
“Crap,” Mark said as they stopped the machine and climbed off.
“What? Did you see something?”
“Yes. I see everything just where we left it.
“I was hoping that somehow a bunch of trailer fairies would come in the night and put everything back together for us.
“And that they’d find the rifles and the BB guns for us and place them right here in the middle of the floor so we could find them.”
“Uh, huh… trailer fairies, huh?”
“Hey, I can dream, can’t I?”
“You’re hopeless, you know that?”
“Yep. I know it. It’s one of the reasons you love me.”
She thought a noncommittal “uh huh” would be best.
They’d gone through eight of the tubs so far, and the forks of the forklift weren’t long enough to reach the rest of them.
So they applied an old forklift operator’s trick and dragged them to the doorway.
Hannah drove the lift to the back of the trailer and Mark climbed aboard with a chain.
He wrapped one end of the chain around the lift’s boom and the other end around the center front foot of the tub.
Then Mark unhooked the chain and she lowered both tubs to the mine floor.
Once she unstacked them Mark popped them both open.
“Honey,” he called to her as she parked the forklift and walked toward him.
“Why did you and Sarah purchase forty bags of guinea pig food?”
“I don’t remember, baby. Just in case we brought some guinea pigs.”
“But we didn’t bring in any guinea pigs. As far as I know we didn’t even know anybody who had any guinea pigs.”
“Hey, back then we were running into this thing blind. And we had a lot of time to talk about things.
“Like, for example, how it would be a shame if all the guinea pigs went extinct because we didn’t bring any in with us and everybody outside the mine ate their guineas during the freeze.
“As I recall, we planned to buy a male and a female at the last minute and bring them into the mine with us just so we could save the species.
“And I guess we got busy doing other things and just forgot.
“Somewhere in this mess we’re gonna find two guinea pig cages and bedding material also.”
“We did bring in dogs and cats. How come you didn’t buy any dog and cat food?”
“Oh, we did. Lots and lots of it. It’s here somewhere too in one of these trailers. We just haven’t come across it yet.
“And as I remember we stopped buying it completely when you found out Sysco carried dry cat and dog food and you started buying it in bulk.”
“So what do we do with all the guinea pig food?”
“Throw it on the save pile. We can feed it to the pigs. Those little buggers are like you. They’ll eat darned near anything.”
At a little past eleven a.m. they heard the lunch bell, chiming off in the distance.
The previous day they’d worked through the lunch hour, thinking they were bound to find the rifles they sought at any minute. And that they’d be done with their task and wouldn’t have to come back.
Today they knew better.
They’d resolved themselves to the realization this project could take as long as a couple of weeks, if the rifles happened to be on the very last trailer they searched.
Luckily Markie was a very patient boy.
And it wasn’t as though they were wasting their time.
In one tub they found seven brand new curling irons, still in the boxes.
Hannah knew that Sarah would be tickled pink at the news, since she’d burned up the four they had keeping her “naturally” curly hair curly.
They also found over a hundred light bulbs; something else they’d been running low on.
And they’d been at it for only a day and a half.
Odds were in the coming days they’d stumble across many more such treasures.
But that was later.
Now was now, and both of them were hungry.
As they’d done the afternoon before, they took one of the tubs they’d emptied and filled it full of items they wanted to share with the others.
Hannah saved the curling irons for last, placing them on top of everything else so they’d be very visible.
“I want to hear Sarah squeal when she sees them,” she explained.
As a last second lark, though, she took three of them and tossed them back into the trailer.
“This way we can hear her squeal again after she burns up those four and then we produce the other three.”
“You’re an evil woman and the absolute worst friend in the world, you know that?”
“Yep and yep.”
Debbie released the children from the one-room school house every day at 11:15 for lunch.
If they hurried they could have lunch with their son.
But Mark had another idea. “Let’s take our time so he’s back in school by the time we get there,” he suggested.
Hannah was aghast.
“Mark Snyder! I’m ashamed of you! You don’t want to see your son?”
“Hey, seeing our son is way overrated. We saw him yesterday. We’ll see him again tomorrow. Heck, we’ll see him this afternoon after we finish working on the trailers.
“I mean, I love him and all. But we don’t have to see him all the time, do we?”
“I guess you’re right. If we have lunch with him he’s just gonna drive us crazy about his rifle and whether or not we’ve found it yet.”
“My point exactly. So let’s just hold back half an hour before we head back. You can wait that long to hear Sarah squeal, can’t you?”
“I suppose. But what will we do to kill half an hour?”
“We could kiss and hug and stuff like that. Since I was wrong and you’re not pregnant after all we could try to make you that way.”
“Ewww. You’re all sweaty and covered with dust and dirt.”
“Honey, you used to tell me you liked it when I was dirty.”
“That wasn’t the kind of dirty I was talking about and you know it.”
They wound up working another tub instead to kill some more time, which held no surprises until they stumbled across a dozen boxes of green paper clips.
Mark held up a handful of them and gave Hannah a puzzled look.
First she shrugged.
Then she said, “Hey, one can never have too many boxes of green paper clips.”
“Good point.”
-25-
“What do you want?” Richard Sears yelled into his radio.
They were polar opposites, the two of them were. Richard was seething with rage, at the thought someone had taken out a man as good as Lenny Geibel. And then had stormed the old prison and taken it over.
John Sennett, on the other hand, was the epitome of coolness. He was calm and spoke in an even tone.
“Oh, I don’t believe I want anything from you, Security One. I’ve already taken what I wanted.
“And I appreciate you making it so easy on me. Only one sentry walking the fence line. And no sentry at all in the prison yard. It was almost as if you’d rolled out the red carpet for us.
“How thoughtful of you. And I only had to kill two people to take charge of such a wonderful place.”
Richard’s rage grew to a new level.
“Who did you kill besides my outside sentry?”
“Oh, calm down, Security One. It was no one important. Just the runny nosed kid operating your control station. The one with the side arm he couldn’t even get out of his holster before I put a bullet in his head.”
He finally shut Richard up.
Richard dropped his radio on the floor of the gatekeeper’s shack.
His knees went weak.
His friends grabbed his shoulders to support him, lest he fall to the floor.
The man on the security station… the only man inside the prison walls who was armed… was Richard Junior.
His son.
Tony Martinez, Richard’s number two and best friend in the world, told him, “Don’t panic just yet, Buddy.
“He might be lying, just to get under your skin.”
“Of course,” Sennett calmly went on, “We’ll have to kill some more if you and your men give us any trouble.”
Richard felt nauseated. Like he was about to throw up.
But he fought it off.
He regained his composure.
As for his emotional state?
He pinned his hopes on Tony’s belief the man inside the walls knew the armed guard was Richard’s son and was playing a cruel joke on him.
Richard said a brief prayer under his breath.
“Do not harm anyone else. If you do I swear you’ll pay with your lives. Every damned one of you.”
It was an empty threat made by a man who was in no position to make it.
Both men knew it.
But Sennett didn’t call him on it.
“Security One, do you mind if I ask you your name?
If we’re going to become friends I’d like to know who I’m dealing with.
“And ‘Security One’ is such an ungainly moniker, don’t you think?”
“One thing we’ll never become,” Richard answered calmly, “is friends.”
Sennett said, “Your name, please.”
This time there was something else in his voice. Something like acid.
He was losing his cool.
His request for Richard’s name wasn’t really a request. It was a demand.
“My name is Richard.”
“Very well, Richard. As I said, my name is John. As long as you and your men don’t try to break your way into my new castle you and I will get along great.
“I hope you don’t mind the cold, Richard. I know it’s not the most comfortable place to be, but look at the bright side.
“You’re alive.
“You could well have met the same fate as the incompetent fool you had walking the fence out there. But you’re alive. And there are plenty of vacant houses in the town of Eden you can take shelter in.
“Plenty of furniture to burn to stay warm.
“As for the food, you’re on your own there. You and your people gathered every bit of food within ten miles and brought it in here.
“You assumed you didn’t owe anyone who wasn’t a resident of Eden a fair chance to it. And you didn’t bother to tell anyone else you knew another freeze was coming.
“Instead you and your people were very selfish and took it all for yourselves.
“That wasn’t very neighborly of you, Richard.
“Not at all.
“So pardon me if I fail to find sympathy for you and your men’s plight.
“I’ll tell you what, Richard. I’ll treat you better than you would have treated us. I will extend the courtesy of offering the gatehouse to you so you have a warm place to stay. I could very easily have my men cut electrical power to it. But I know it’s nice and cozy there. It might be a bit crowded for you and your men. But at least it’ll be warm.
“Consider it a professional courtesy from a victor to his vanquished.”
He laughed a sadistic laugh.
There was nothing else to be said.
Richard’s battery light was flashing. It was down to ten percent of its battery life.
He dejectedly placed it into the battery charger on the shack’s tiny desk.
Rest in Peace Page 8