The Winslow Incident (31 page)

It’d also been bullshit about not
telling anybody in Stepstone what was happening up here so Sean wouldn’t get
busted. It was so
he
wouldn’t get in trouble. Pard would kill Tanner—douse
him with fuel and toss him in the trench—if he were the reason any of this
got out.

Who cares anyway?
he thought.
I’m so outta here.
His parents would
have to take him back in. It wasn’t his fault the whole thing turned to shit.
For once, it really
wasn’t
his fault.

Wondering how much gas he had left
in the bike, Tanner glanced down at the tank as he crested the last hill before
the bridge. What he saw when he looked up again shocked him.

It’s too late.

His heart sank. Too late to cross
the bridge, too late even to turn around because the ranch hands were all
looking at him with a lot of interest. Rifles at the ready, six men and one
woman stood in front of trucks parked across the near end of the bridge,
blocking off both incoming and outgoing traffic.

As Tanner puttered downhill toward
the mouth of the bridge he told himself,
Act like you meant to be here.

When
he came to a stop before her, Maggie Clark asked, “Where you headed, kid?”

Kenny Clark stood next to her in
his stone-washed jeans and his lariat belt buckle. He unrolled a soft pack from
the sleeve of his t-shirt and shook out a cigarette. “Yeah, where you headed on
my
bike?”

Jack-off
, Tanner didn’t have the guts to say out loud.

Tanner cut the engine and got off
the motorcycle, thinking,
Damn, my leg hurts.
It felt swollen, and it
crackled when he put his weight on it. Crackled.
Damn.

To Maggie, Tanner said, “Uncle
Pard wants me to help stand guard.”

“I doubt that.” She started to say
more but then abruptly brushed past him, moving up to the road along with the
other suddenly mobilized cowhands.

Tanner turned to see a station
wagon lurching downhill toward the bridge, alternating between too much
accelerator and too much brake. Tanner figured the driver must be seriously
wasted.

The ranch hands leapt out of the
way just as the car weaved dangerously close to the guardrail. In a squelch of
tires the car jerked to a stop two feet short of the barricade.

Now Tanner recognized the driver:
that tall, skinny kid with the lame black Mohawk. James Bolinger, he
remembered. Obviously this was his first time behind the wheel.

The kid rolled up his window quick
while a woman in the passenger’s seat smiled pleasantly at the cowhands closing
in on the station wagon, as if they were bringing her a root beer float.

Maggie tapped the driver’s window
with her rifle. “Turn it around.”

James cranked the window back
down. “But it’s the only way out.”

“Nobody leaves,” Maggie said.

“Says who?” James asked.

“Sheriff. Town’s under quarantine.
We can’t let you infect the whole valley.”

“I’m not sick,” James said, even
as his face took on a guilty expression. Then he mumbled, “Not really.”

“Not yet.” Maggie gestured with
her rifle. “What about her?”

The woman had gotten out of the
car and was heading for the bridge railing.

“Mom!” James yelled. “Get back
here!”

She leaned over the rail to peer
down at the river. “It’s so beautiful . . .”

“Go ahead, Emily,” Kenny Clark
said.

She spun around to look at him
with eyes big and bright. “We are as beautiful as butterflies.” Emily’s smile
turned to a look of puzzlement. “Time to fly?”

Kenny grinned at her and nodded.
“Go ahead, Butterfly. Fly.”

Emily turned back, grabbed the
railing with both hands, and hoisted one leg. Then with one foot up on the rail
and the other dangling above the pedestrian walkway, she hesitated.

“Mom!” James flung open his door
and ran toward her just as she raised her trailing leg to fully stand on the
rail, bobbing and teetering like a sprung jack-in-the-box.

James shouted, “Don’t look down!”

At that, she looked down at the
river and Tanner saw sheer fright strike her face right before James snatched
her by one flapping arm and a trembling leg and pulled her off the railing.

Emily immediately squirmed loose from
him and raced off the bridge, singing, “Free, free, you’ll never catch me.”

Looking panicked, James rushed
back to the station wagon, scrambled in, and then swerved backwards the way
they’d come while Kenny laughed and everyone else swung their attention to the
sound of a vehicle grinding into low gear at the far end of the bridge.

A flatbed truck driven by a fat
man approached in slow motion.

The cowhands stayed this side of
the blockade until the moment the truck stopped several yards away, its driver
confused by the obstruction. Then they stepped out with their rifles and were
on the guy before he could think to slam it into reverse and get the hell out
of there.

Tanner was never going to get
another chance like this. He jumped back on the bike and kick started it with a
foot that felt as if it might fall off anytime now.

In the two seconds it took him to
decide that he should go back the way he’d come rather than try and squeeze
around the trucks, Kenny Clark grabbed him by the hair with one hand and by his
t-shirt with the other. The shirt ripped but the hair held as Kenny yanked him
off the bike and slammed him to the ground. No sooner was he down than another
cowboy picked him up and punched him in the gut.

Doubling over, Tanner caught a
knee beneath his chin. His teeth clacked together hard.
That’s funny
, he
thought,
I actually see stars . . .

“Enough,” he heard somebody say
through the blood rushing in his ears. He looked toward the voice, his focus
swimming, and realized it was Old Pete.

They had the truck driver now, who
was looking at Tanner with a mixture of sympathy and terror. Kenny came back at
him and Tanner flinched away, but Kenny was on him and putting an arm across
his shoulders, a brotherly gesture. And the asshole who’d sucker-punched him
held out his hand as if to say,
No hard feelings.

Not knowing how to get out of it, Tanner
shook the calloused hand, all the while marveling,
What the hell?
These
people are seriously fucked up.

He looked at the fat man again,
trying to figure out who he might be and what he was doing here . . . and how
soon someone would notice he’d gone missing because it was obvious they weren’t
planning to let him go either.

The man’s eyes darted around as if
he weren’t clear who was in charge here. Finally, they landed on Old Pete. “I
need to talk to Pard Holloway,” he said.

Kenny scoffed, his arm still
around Tanner in a posture both possessive and threatening.

Old Pete whistled and rolled his
eyes. “Pard’s a busy man right about now, Earley. What’s there to talk about?”

Tanner had never seen anybody look
so nervous as this man Earley, and figured him for the grain guy Hazel had told
him about. You could fill a gallon bucket wringing out his shirt. Then he
realized that if moldy flour and feed really were to blame for all this, Fritz
Earley
oughta
be scared shitless.

And he could see the man mentally
kicking himself,
Why did I come up here?

Tanner was kicking himself too.
Why
did I waste so much time dilly-dallying around with Hazel Winslow? I could’ve
been—should’ve been—halfway down the mountain by now instead of
getting the shit kicked outta me.

And then he wondered who would be
sorrier he didn’t make it out.

J
inx was gone, but Hazel’s motorcycle was still
there. Pitched in the dirt at the side of Loop-Loop Road, her Yamaha looked
broken, beat-up—looked pretty much the way she felt.

“Jinx!” She whistled for him,
producing more wheeze than whistle. “Come here, boy!”

No use, the Irish setter was gone,
and she could only hope some sane and sympathetic person had happened upon him
and was now nursing him back to health with hamburgers and hot dogs (his
favorite).
Or buried him
, she couldn’t help but think, and tears blurred
her vision.

She forced herself to get moving,
to leave Jinx yet again in the belief—delusional, she
recognized—that he’d find her like he always managed to, every day,
before all of this started.

Three days ago.
She blinked hard against the tears, against her utter
disbelief.

Just three days ago she’d fought
with her dad about being out too late Friday night. How ridiculous. Three days
ago she’d accused Patience of being completely paranoid, of looking for
trouble. Three days ago Jinx was still wagging his tail. And Sean still wanted
to hold her hand.

She glanced westward, squinting
against the sunset.
Three days? Impossible.

Walking up Loop-Loop Road, bugs
stuck to her sticky skin and hunger churned her empty belly. She adjusted her
arm in the makeshift sling and took a stab at mental imagery to distract her
mind from the misery of her ruined elbow. She’d read somewhere that people
endure surgery without anesthesia by concentrating on pleasant thoughts:
beaches and waterfalls, kittens and puppies. So she willed herself to think
about swimming in Ruby Creek with Sean, and her grandmother brushing her hair
with the soft-bristled Bakelite hairbrush, and her father giving her a bear
hug, the kind that squishes her ribcage and makes her beg for mercy.

But the pain was stubborn and
refused to leave. So she carried it with her between the quaking aspens, up
Winslow Road, back toward town.

Still hot despite the setting sun,
the heat was cooking the grime deeper into her skin. She looked down at her
feet carrying her along the dusty, pot-holed road and turned Tanner’s words
over in her mind: “I’ll take you to your mother.”

Now she felt foolish, ashamed
even, that she’d even been tempted. After all, her mother knew where to find
her. If she wanted to bother.

Swatting at the pack of gnats
swarming her head, she questioned whether anybody had ever felt this lonely.
Somebody sentenced to life in a Turkish prison, she supposed, or somebody
shipwrecked and floating on a makeshift raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Can you hear me?
she sent out a telepathic message to Sean.
Where are
you?
Then she emptied her mind, open to his reassuring response.

No answer came. Instead, tears
rose. But she would not let herself cry again—too draining. And she
needed to think about what to do next.

“I have to warn people not to eat the
bread,” she told Sean, wherever he might be. “But if I do that, will I get you
into trouble?”

Still no answer, telepathic or
otherwise.

She continued anyway. “Zachary
must know what’s going on and why, because he told Violet and Daisy not to eat
any bread.” She scratched her nose. “But has he told anyone else?”

It was Violet’s voice that answered
her. “Daddy’s not well,” echoed in Hazel’s mind.

Hazel kicked a pinecone out of her
way. “Why the hell didn’t Zachary listen to you, Sean? If he had, we wouldn’t
be in this stinkin’ mess, now would we?”

Almost to town, she suddenly
realized that she should’ve erased Sean’s apology from the granite wall, and that
she’d have to go back out to Matherston Cemetery at first light. “I swore I’d
protect you, Sean. Crossed my heart and hoped to die.”

In an instance of poor planning,
the church cemetery was the first thing greeting visitors upon arrival
downtown. The hand-painted sign directly preceding the graveyard (Rose
Peabody’s handiwork) read,
Welcome to
Winslow
, and Hazel always thought “more dead than alive” would be an
appropriate add-on.

More signs followed:
The Winslow—left on Ruby Road, Clemshaw
Mercantile on Fortune Way, Cal’s Fish ’n Bait, Rhone Bakery since 1924
,
and finally,
Rose’s Crock
decorated
with pie slices and a T-bone pointing straight ahead.

Hazel veered into the cemetery.
The plots sat tiered up the hill, each section contained by a low retaining
wall constructed of brick or granite and bordered by wrought iron fencing. From
the top of the rise, the small church kept watch over the dead.

The graveyard had another visitor,
who glanced up from chewing grass next to the Mathers section of graves beside
a huge oak tree. Hazel slogged up the hill and when she reached the oak, slung
her good arm around a low branch and leaned against its cragged bark.

“Did you escape from the ranch?”
she asked the cow mowing around Sadie Mathers’ grave.

Chewing her cud, the cow stared at
Hazel with enormous eyes.

“Good for you.” Hazel looked up at
the oak’s massive branches; it had grown, evidently, since Sadie’s brother
Sterling dug her up from the Winslow family graveyard and reburied her beside
the tree.