The Last Exit to Normal Page 8
I did, picking the chair closest to the door in case I had to run. I tried not to stare at the weirdness of the cows. “Thank you.” I figured the safest bet was to keep it simple. One-word answers. That way I couldn’t say anything stupid.
Mr. Johan noticed my eyes wandering, but he kept staring at my hat. “Mrs. Johan likes cows.”
I nodded. “Nice.”
He smiled, a joke in his eyes. “If you like cows.”
He waited for me to say something, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to talk about. “I like cows.”
He sat back, crossing one knee over the other and folding his hands like my old shrink, Dr. Fruitloops, did back in Spokane. “You look nervous.”
“I always do. It’s a thing with me.”
He gave a short laugh. “Kimberly’s brother can come on strong.”
Edward’s manners class pounded through my head, but I was totally flustered. I have a tendency to say what’s on my mind when I’m out of sorts. My palms were sweating. “I’m sure he wouldn’t kill me. Maybe just maim me.”
This time Mr. Johan laughed outright. “Dirk is nineteen. He works for Mrs. Johan’s sister in Wyoming, busting horses. He’s visiting.”
“Oh.” Hopefully he’d be leaving in six or seven minutes.
“Kimberly tells me you’re interested in courting her.”
I shook my head. “I just want to date her, sir.”
He looked at me. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not that kind of guy. Really. We’re going to bale hay.”
He smiled. “ ‘Courting’ means ‘to take out,’ Ben. ‘To date.’ ”
“Oh.” I looked anywhere but at him, and it looked like it was back to being the social retard of the year.
“You’re from Spokane, right?”
I nodded.
“How do you like it here?”
“Well, I hated it until yesterday.”
He laughed. “It must be difficult to come to such a different place.”
I shrugged. “It’s not really that bad. Hot.”
He looked me up and down. “You seem to have changed your appearance since arriving.”
“Well, Kimberly said we’d be doing work, so my stepdad took me shopping today at the Saddleman.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your stepdad?”
“Edward. My dad’s husband. You know him, right?”
Mr. Johan took a breath, then smiled. “Yes. Eddie. He’s a bit younger than me. Very interesting circumstance for you, I’d bet.”
“I’m fine as long as I take my medication. No violent outbursts, anyway.”
He stared blankly at me.
“I was joking, sir.”
He broke into a grin. “Oh, I see. Yes. A joke.”
Just then Kimberly came downstairs and saved me. I stood up. “Hi.”
She smiled, then stared at my hat. “Hi. Ready? We’re late.”
Mr. Johan walked us to the door, shaking my hand again and telling Kimberly she should be home by nine. We walked to her truck, and when I got in, my hat hit the roof and fell into the gutter. She looked at me and smiled when I picked it up. I closed the door. “So, why is everybody staring at my hat?”
She took a baseball cap from the seat next to her and put it on. “My dad?”
“And your brother. They were looking at it like it was a lava lamp or something.”
“You wore it inside.”
“So?”
She smiled. “You’re not supposed to wear hats inside. My parents are sort of proper.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I glanced at it sitting on my lap. “Is it dorky?”
She burst out laughing. “It’s the goofiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
She put the truck in gear and drove. “I like the spikes better.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They’re different.”
The image of our kids switched to them running around with spiked hair. “Everybody here has to do the same things and look the same way, don’t they?”
She paused, then said, “This is a pretty conservative place.”
I rolled my eyes in agreement. “The three of us go over well here, huh?”
She giggled. “Like a fart in church.”
“What?”
She laughed. “Never mind. It’s just a saying. My uncle says it all the time.”
“You didn’t tell me you had a brother.”
She smiled, shifting into third. “I have a brother. There. I told you.”
“He’s . . . big.”
She nodded. “He’s just a typical big brother. Protective of me.”
“I don’t want to have sex with you.”
She laughed. “What?”
“I mean, you can tell him that. You know, just baling some hay. Nice innocent stuff. Tell him I’m a eunuch or something.”
She sighed. “I can take care of myself, thank you very much.”
“So, you do want to have sex? Because if you do, it’d be fine, but I usually don’t do that on the first date.”
She laughed. “You just say whatever comes into your head, huh?”
“Ben’s lifelong problem.”
She glanced over at me. “You look different. I’m surprised.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t seem to be the kind of person to conform so easily.”
I didn’t tell her that the only reason I would conform to anything was the female gender. “Well, I thought, When in Rome, do as the Montanans. And we are going to work. I needed boots and stuff.”
“You’re funny.”
“Thanks. It makes up for being ugly.”
She giggled as we hit the edge of town, and then looked over at the horizon. Clouds had gathered like huge, filmy cotton balls. “It’s going to storm.”
“It actually rains here? I thought it was like the Gobi Desert or something. Rain every hundred years.”
She smiled. “Oh, it does. Comes in quick, too.” She looked again. “You haven’t seen a summer storm here, have you?”
“Nope.”
She sped up. “We’d better hurry.”
As we drove, the silence made me edgy. “You know Billy Hinks, right?”
“Sure. Why?”
“What’s their deal, anyway?”
“Let me guess. Mr. Hinks doesn’t like you.”
“Yeah. He’s pretty harsh on Billy.”
“Sort of a bad situation. Dad says that ever since Mrs. Hinks left, Mr. Hinks has been bitter. Angry a lot of the time.”
“She left, right?”
“Yeah. One night. Just up and left. Nobody even saw it coming. She was quiet, though. Never talked much to anybody.”
“People around here don’t like them too much, do they?”
She looked at me. “They’re sort of weird, I guess.”
I told her about the three guys in the Bronco.
She grunted. “Greg Thompson, Ron Jamison, and the tagalong, Cobie Wilson.”
“Let me guess. The town bullies.”
She shook her head. “Not really. Ron can be a jerk sometimes, but Greg is nice. Cobie just does whatever Ron does.”
I tried to remember what Greg, the driver, looked like, but couldn’t. “Greg is nice, huh?”
“Yeah. We dated for a little bit before school let out.”
“Past tense, right? Like in ‘date-ed’?”
She smiled. “Whoa. Slow down there, boy. We’re going baling, not on a honeymoon.”
I smiled. “Well, it is a kind of date. I just like to know the field, you know? Know who I’m up against.”
She laughed, but there was an undercurrent of gloom. “I think I’m the one who decides who I date, Ben Campbell, and I’ll tell you one thing: I don’t date jealous guys.”
I backed off. “So, what’s the deal with beating kids with belts around here?” I told her about Billy.
She shrugged. “That happens.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah, but generally speaking, it’s considered child abuse.”
“People do things differently around here. It’s not like the city, where kids can do whatever they want.”
I remembered the sheriff. And my dad. I was getting sick of the whole “different” thing. “Oh, so that’s the excuse? We-all ’round here do stuff different-like, so you jus’ keep yer nose outta our biznass?”
She drove in silence for a minute, then set her chin. “No, as a matter of fact, it’s not that way.”
I told her the whole story, including killing the cat. “So you think that putting welts on a kid’s back for basically what amounts to talking to me is fine?”
She looked straight ahead. “No, I don’t. But that’s not the point. Billy did something he wasn’t supposed to, and he got in trouble for it.”
I didn’t buy it. “So you got strapped when you were a kid?”
“No. Daddy doesn’t strap girls. Dirk got it, though. A few times.”
“I don’t know. It just seemed . . . mean.”
“Was it that bad?”
“Bad enough that my dad called the sheriff.”
“Really?”
I nodded.
“What did he do?”
“Looked at the welts, then told Billy to do what his dad says from now on.”
She hesitated. “Well, if the sheriff saw them, I’m sure it’s fine.”
“What was his mom like? Usually the mom takes the kid when she splits.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Like yours?”
“I said ‘usually.’ What was she like?”
“Nice. She used to walk Billy to the park and stuff all the time. They kept to themselves mostly, though. Her family was Jehovah’s Witness, and they sort of disowned her when she went Pentecostal. Daddy says she probably had enough of both and just left. Couldn’t take it anymore.”
CHAPTER 11
We drove in silence for a long time, then, and when Kimberly turned onto a dirt driveway, I saw the farm. The barn was bigger than the house. “That’s a big barn.”
She smiled. “Can’t turn back now, city boy.”
“Just saying.” As we came around the corner, I saw a huge flatbed truck stacked with bales of hay. “I thought we were going to bale hay.”
“We are.”
I pointed. “That’s full. They’re already made.”
She laughed. “Did you think that we’d make them ourselves? Machines do that. It’s our job to take them into the barn.”
The stack suddenly grew. “Like with a machine?”
“No, like with our hands. Come on.”
We walked up to the truck, and there was a note taped to the driver’s-side window. Kimberly read it, then nodded. “My uncle’s tractor broke down near Grogan’s Flat.”
“Where’s that?”
She pointed past the farmhouse. “Six hundred acres that way.”
An acre could be a mile, for all I knew. “So what do we do?”
She looked at the sky. The clouds we’d seen from the highway were now piled like a wall of black over the farmhouse, ominous and huge in the big sky. “We get the tarps out.”
I looked at the clouds over the house. “For us?”
She ran into the barn, calling to me, “For the hay! Come on, I want to get this done and get out to Uncle Morgan.”
“Why?”
She pointed to the storm. “It’s going to be big. They come on fast and can be dangerous.”
I followed her into the barn, the musty smell of heat and hay filling my lungs. “Just call him.”
She went to a corner and grabbed a heavy-duty green tarp. “No service out there, and he leaves his phone home most times. He’s sort of old-fashioned.”
Just then a boom of thunder hit my ears. Not a rumble or a crack, but an explosion. I jumped as the rafters shook, filaments of hay falling on my head. “You weren’t joking, were you?”
She ran outside. “Grab those straps!”
I looked around, feeling like a dork again, and saw a bundle of straps hanging on the wall near the tarps. I wrapped my arms around them and ran out just as the rain hit, and just like everything else in Rough Butte, it didn’t just start, it made a statement. One second it was dry; the next I was getting pummeled. The drops were so big and coming down so fast, it almost hurt. I was instantly drenched.
Kimberly heaved the tarp on top of the fifteen-foot wall of hay, then grabbed ahold of the bale wires and clambered to the top. The rain came down so hard, I could barely see the farmhouse fifty yards away, and then she was yelling at me again. “Get the other tarp and throw it up to me!”
I dropped the straps and ran to the barn, fumbling with my gloves before I took the tarp out and tried to throw it to her. She’d made it look like a piece of cake, and as I threw the heavy thing again, I nearly ripped the muscles from my shoulders trying. It made it, though, and she started spreading it across the back half of the hay. The sides flapped down, blowing in the wind as the world lit up like a strobe light.
Half a second later, the thunder shook my teeth. I stood there, looking up at her, almost in awe as this beautiful and willowy girl danced back and forth on a fifteen-foot-tall mountain of hay in the most hellacious storm I’d ever been in.
“Get the straps and attach them to the corners and along the bottom!” she yelled, the pour of the rain muffling her voice as she worked. “There’s hooks on the edge of the truck to attach them! Hurry!”
It took me a second to untangle the straps I’d thrown on the now muddy ground, and another second to find the hooks on the truck. They had it set up so you didn’t have to tie anything, and there was a buckle you pulled on to cinch the strap tight. I yanked, then ran around the truck to the other side, doing the same. Kimberly climbed down and we piggybacked each other, going down the line and securing everything.
By the time we got done, I knew I should have been freezing cold, but I wasn’t. My heart hammered in my chest like a mallet. The rain hit like ice balls, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees in a matter of minutes. We ran to the pickup and hopped in, Kimberly firing it up and turning on the heater.
I couldn’t hear the engine run for the racket drumming down on the hood and the top of the cab, and as I wiped the water from my eyes, she flipped on the wipers full blast and put the truck in gear. I looked out the window. I’d never been in a storm so bad that the water splashing up from the ground made a hazy fog up to the bumper of the truck. I shook my head as another boom of thunder vibrated through us. “This is crazy.”
Kimberly, cranking the wheel and giving it gas, didn’t crack a smile. “It’s not over.”
“Where are we going?”
“Grogan’s Flat. Uncle Morgan is still out there.”
“Won’t he just come home?”
She shook her head. “You don’t know Uncle Morgan.”
I supposed that meant the guy would stay out no matter if the world cracked in half and swallowed him whole. The rain poured harder, almost to the point where you couldn’t see even with the wipers going full bore, and as Kimberly took a right onto a dirt trail going through the fields, she slowed.
Mud sucked at the tires and she downshifted, then yanked on a shorter stick shift near the floorboard. The truck jerked. “What’s that?”
“Four-wheel drive. We might get stuck.”
I felt the shift as the front wheels grabbed the mud, and we bounced and sloshed and slid along the track. For as flat as this part of Montana was, there were gullies and ravines and slopes that I’d not noticed before, and we almost slid off the track a couple of times. “What happens if we get stuck?” I asked.
“We don’t get stuck.”
Ten minutes later, after several incredibly hairy moments in the truck, the track went from mud to a running stream. Kimberly gunned the engine up a slope, the tires spitting mud and water up the sides of the windows as they gripped the slippery hill. I could only sit and marvel. My future wife could do anything, and I realiz
ed I was having the best time of my life. “This is awesome.”
She smiled. “Nice first date, huh?”
“The best.”
She searched through the rain, the headlights barely cutting through the wall of water blanketing the fields. “Keep an eye out for the tractor. We should be coming up on it soon.”
I couldn’t see fifty yards in any direction. “What’s it look like?”
“Big and green.”
A few minutes later, I spotted a hulking shape in the distance, through the passenger window. “There it is!”
She slowed, then cranked the wheel, churning up the hill and winding the engine up. “This isn’t good.”
“What?”
She looked ahead as she drove. “He’s on a side slope.”
“What does that mean?”
She sped up, all four tires spinning as we ground our way closer. She peered through the rain. “It slid. Crap.” As we neared and the tractor was clearly visible, she gasped. “Oh God. It tipped over.”
I looked, noticing Morgan’s own pickup parked at the crest of the hill, fifteen yards from the big machine. I’d never seen whatever kind of tractor it was, but I could see the huge rear wheel sticking up in the sky. “How did it tip?”
“When it rains this hard, the soil can’t hold the water. The weight of the tractor will make the surface give way.” A tinge of panic hit her voice as we came to a stop near the toppled thing. She left the engine running and jumped out, slipping and sliding up the rest of the slope.
I grabbed my cowboy hat and hopped out, following as fast as I could in the shadow of the clouds and hammering rain. The air lit up three times with lightning, one clap after another as the thunder deafened me. I fell, sunk to my wrist in mud, and scrambled up. I could hear Kimberly screaming her uncle’s name over the noise as she circled around the tractor.
I finally reached it, scrambling around the opposite way from where she searched for him. Then I saw him. He and I looked at each other through the rain, and his eyes, filled with pain, blazed into mine. He reminded me of a trapped animal, angry and hurt. I screamed for Kimberly, and as she came around the corner and saw her uncle pinned under the machine, her eyes widened. She fell to her knees beside him, me following suit. His hips were smashed under the frame of the cab. He looked at her. “It’s going to slide more, Kim, and I’m going with it. Get away.”