Bleeding Kansas (40 page)

Jim sat down on one of the sawhorses. Elaine Logan was saying her baby had died in the fire; he had to assume that this was what she meant. She must have been the girl who miscarried in the Fremantles' back bedroom. Why else would she carry the article around with her?

He'd have to take the clipping back to the Fremantles'. If it was this precious to her, she'd be missing it. Unspoken, in the back of his mind, was the thought of Gina. If he took Elaine's clipping back, Gina would come to the door. They would—do nothing.

His watch beeped. Jesus Christ! Nine in the morning, and he hadn't even put the nitrogen in the spreader. Enough of all these women: his wife, nursing her grief like an old sock; his daughter, gambling with sex and missing school; and his—not his lover, not after a single embrace—call her his neighbor. And that damned drunk Elaine. Enough of all of them. He put the cart away, hitched the spreader to the tractor, and began filling it with sacks of fertilizer.

W
HEN HE REALIZED
how much media attention circled around the calf, Junior Schapen started coming home more often. He was thinking partly of his future. The pros didn't scout Tonganoxie Bible, and someone with connections in the NFL might see him here on national television. At least, that was one of Junior's excuses to Myra—that, along with his pious duty to help her and Arnie with their sacred charge.

“He's so bogus,” Robbie complained to Lara. “How come Dad and Nanny don't see through that whole pious bullshit line he feeds them?”

Robbie figured his brother's real reason for coming home so often was the chance to bully people visiting the farm. One Thursday, the animal rights group ARK—Animals R Kin—were picketing, as they had each day since learning the Schapens were raising an animal just to slaughter her. Junior had attacked them as though they were the opposing line, or even the anti-Christ. He'd actually given one woman a concussion and broken her arm.

The woman had threatened to sue, but Arnie said the people from ARK were trespassers who'd been asked to leave more than once. He, his mother, and Gail Ruesselmann were all witnesses to the fact that the ARK people had acted as though they were about to attack Junior first.

“Junior loved the whole event,” Robbie told Lara, “and Nanny was as proud as if he'd saved America from Osama bin Laden. Then she was on my butt about where had I been. Of course I didn't tell her that!”

Lara giggled, because he'd been with her, as they were this evening, in their new hideout: the loft of the old Fremantle barn.

In the beginning, starting with the Sunday the crowds first swarmed to the Schapen farm, they met in Lara's truck; she parked it on the track in the X-Farm and they sneaked away from their separate homes to meet. They sat in the cab, sheltered from any prying eyes by the towering sunflowers, grabbing hungrily at each other, exchanging bits of news about their discordant families in breathless whispers.

That refuge lasted only a short time. After Lara tried burning the sunflower packages, her father felt so stricken that he asked Curly to salvage what he could of the seeds. Curly cleaned the hopper, combined the field, and disked under the stalks. When Lara got home from school, Jim showed her the yield: only sixteen hundred pounds, less than ten percent of what they would have gotten if they'd harvested on time! Lara was so upset by the small crop that it was easy to hide her dismay at the loss of her secret place.

That evening, she and Robbie embraced furtively in the open field and then sped home before anyone spotted them. Lara spent that night putting the meager harvest into what remained of Abigail's Organics bags. She could sell these at the farmers' market, even if the harvest was too small to market on the scale she and Susan had envisioned when they put the crop in. Then next year, unless Dad had to sell the X-Farm, people would at least recognize the name.

Robbie spent that same evening in the barn, ignoring Myra's criticism and Junior's bullying while he worked out chords on his guitar.

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.”