Kind of Kin (19 page)

Monday | February 25, 2008 | 1:30
P.M.

Brown's farm | Cedar

D
ear God, Sweet said to herself, not prayerfully, as she sat in her car watching the men standing around her daddy's barn smoking cigarettes and spitting brown Skoal streams on the muddy ground. Those poor kids out yonder, she thought. What must they be thinking by now? Terry had been stuck to her side like beggar's lice all morning while more and more vehicles filled with searchers poured in to her daddy's yard. A couple of times she had managed to stroll to the corner of the barn and peer nonchalantly across the pasture toward the dump, but she saw no sign of Juanito's pickup. Surely they wouldn't come in with all this activity in the barnyard? Surely if they'd tried, they would have seen from a distance what was happening and stayed put. She couldn't figure out how to drive back to them without raising Tee's suspicions, much less conjure some smooth way to sneak that big white Dodge Ram past this passel of men. And these guys weren't going anywhere, at least not until after the sheriff got back. And then, well, the sheriff would be here. Strutting his banty walk, preening for the cameras, holding court in front of the barn.

Through the windshield Sweet watched her husband talking with the others, one steel-toed work boot propped on his tailgate. He wasn't in hunting clothes and he wasn't chewing tobacco—she'd made him quit that before they got married—otherwise he was indistinguishable from the rest. The brimmed cap. The serious, concerned frown. The secret excitement. Each of them wanted to be the one to find Dustin. Sweet felt she could see both parts in them: how truly bothered they were by this situation—the lost boy could be their own boy, their own grandson—and so they had to act gruff in order to not let their emotions show. They
had
to chain-smoke, spit tobacco juice, talk about the weather and the brambly terrain in low, grumbling voices, so as not to let their throats catch.

But at the same time, Sweet thought, there was a little thrill in the back of each one's mind—maybe he'd be the one to save the day. For the boy's sake, of course, and the family, too, sure. But still. Maybe this very day he himself, the searcher, would turn out to be a hero. They were all secretly thinking it, Sweet believed. She loved them. She hated them. She wished they'd all go home. No. She wished they'd just go out and look for Dustin, comb the hills and the valleys, everywhere, everywhere, except across the creek, the south ridge that held the old mine. But nobody was leaving. And her husband stood there among them, his face grave and concerned, just like the rest, and he meant it, he really did. He
was
worried. He loved Dustin. She knew that. He loved Dustin, and he loved her, and maybe in some ways he even loved her daddy. And still he had done what he did.

Suddenly Sweet swung open the car door. Terry turned to look at her. “Where you going, babe?” “Nowhere,” she answered. “I just feel like sitting on the front porch.” And that's what she did, walked around the house and climbed the front steps and sat in the heavy iron lawn chair somebody had dragged up there from the weed-ridden yard. She looked at the overgrown field beyond the fence in front of the house, the blue humpbacked hills in the distance. Her chest was heaving, not with sobs, or even gulps of air, just a slow, steady, up-and-down heave, because she knew now that she was going to leave her husband. Not a temporary separation, not a little secret heart murder that she didn't honestly mean, but for real and all. The sense of ending, the completeness of it, was a little bit like death. After a moment, Sweet put her hand on her breastbone, pressed hard, harder; then she stood up and went in the house.

The familiar smell hit her—linoleum wax, linseed oil, the musty spidery smell creeping up from the cellar—and for a second she almost broke down. She didn't break though, but gritted her teeth and went directly to Daddy's room at the back of the house. Quickly she opened the cedar chest at the foot of his bed and pulled out several mothball-scented quilts, stacked them on the bedspread, and then went to the kitchen. Damn it, she thought, opening and shutting cupboards. There's nothing here. She opened the fridge, stared at the empty shelves. What was her daddy doing, starving the boy? Chicken broth and tomato paste and three cans of Pet milk. Fat lot of good that was going to do. Sweet tasted salt at the corner of her mouth; she licked back the tears, plucked a couple of black trash bags from the box on the shelf and returned to the bedroom to stuff the quilts inside.

From the wall closet she pulled out Daddy's tan feeding jacket for Juanito and a bumpy, slick red down vest for Misty Dawn; she was thinking that they'd just have to wrap the baby in quilts to keep her warm, when she spied her daddy's rifle standing butt down in the dark closet corner. With hardly a thought she carried the gun to the bed and stuffed it barrel-first in the trash bag with the quilts. Then she lugged the bags to the front room, where she paused to grab the two hurricane lamps off the mantel. But no, that would be way too obvious if she toted those outside. And she couldn't stuff them in with the quilts and jackets, kerosene would leak all over everything. Another vehicle was coming up the drive; she could hear the motor, the crunch of gravel—might the men from this morning be coming back? Sweet stepped to the side window. Two men in insulated coveralls and orange hunting vests were getting out of a dark green Jeep Grand Cherokee—newcomers.

Sweet went back to the kitchen. Silent tears began sliding down her cheeks when she tugged open the cellar door and made her way down the splintery steps until she could feel for the light string overhead. The yellow bulb showed the shelved rows of dust-rimmed Mason jars full of home-canned green beans and tomatoes and okra and blackberry jelly and pickled pigs' feet and shredded pork. She gathered as many jars as she could carry and went back upstairs, where she grabbed the cans of chicken broth and condensed milk from the pantry, fished some spoons and forks and a can opener out of the kitchen drawer, and then began emptying the cleaning supplies out of a beat-up brown Rubbermaid tub she pulled out from under the sink. Sweet had to pause to wipe her face on her sleeve as she set the food jars and cans inside the tub. She dumped the Lipton packets out of the tea canister, found some more trash bags, and in the living room she knelt and unscrewed the globes from the two hurricane lamps, poured the kerosene into the tea canister, tightened down the lid, set everything in the rubber tub and cushioned it as well as she could. The slow silent tears were still running when she went into the bathroom and retrieved a couple of hand towels to wrap the globes in, still running as she swaddled the filled tub in layers of black trash bags, but by the time she stepped out onto the back porch, the tears had stopped. She took a deep breath, went down the back steps toward her husband.

She smiled when she got close. “I cleaned out the fridge, a bunch of old food garbage and stuff. I'm going to take it out to the dump before it stinks up the house.”

Terry was distracted. “Need any help?” he said, but his gaze was on the first fellow from the Explorer who was now explaining things to the two newcomers.

“It's not that much,” she said, and got in her car, drove to the back porch. She would have liked to drive around to the front where nobody would see her putting the trash bags in the car, but that would most likely just draw suspicion, so she backed up to the rear porch steps, parked as close as she could. She was surprised, really, at her own calmness as she loaded the trash bags in her trunk. Maybe it wasn't true calm, just exhaustion, but somehow it didn't seem to matter now how any of this turned out. Whether she went to jail or not. Whether they caught Juanito or didn't. Whether her daddy came home or got sent to the McAlester state pen. She waved a little friendly wave at her husband as she passed the barn.

Driving slowly across the pasture, her tongue thick and metallic tasting from too many hours without food, she considered that maybe her calmness was not just fatigue but also hunger. The only thing that seemed to matter, really, was Dustin, and even that, she thought, was going to be all right. Or it would be what it would be. She passed the old dump in a kind of daze, drove around the downed barbed wire where Juanito's truck had broken through. Now, though—
now
her heart quickened.

The moment she started down the steep track toward the creek, those old fight-or-flight self-preservation hormones, or whatever they were, rushed a fierce heat through her veins. Her chest burned. Her mind raced as fiercely as her blood. All this time, she realized, ever since this whole sorry saga began, she'd been thinking in old ways. And the old ways were gone, her old life was gone. There was nobody at home she had to go fix breakfast for, nobody to drive to school or clean house for, nobody to bathe and diaper and spoon-feed. For the first time in seventeen and a half years, she was alone. The bottom of her car scraped and bumped against the high humps as she descended toward the water; she did not have four-wheel drive, she did not even swim all that well. She stared at the muddy creek sweeping fast across the invisible bridge, but she did not hesitate, just glided the Taurus straight into it, because there was one other thought going round and round in her mind, eddying like the brown swirling water churning beneath the car's chassis: this had all been arranged.

Monday | February 25, 2008 | 5:00
P.M.

Paseo District | Oklahoma City

B
y the end of the day State Representative Monica Moorehouse was hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Not necessarily in that order. She waited in her office with the door closed until she heard Beverly leave at last. The outer hall had been quiet for hours. Still, Monica sat in her Aeron chair, tapping her nails on the mahogany desktop. Her cell phone buzzed. She ignored it. The thought of going home to Charlie and his TiVo and his clicker and his advice and questions and rehashed commentary from all those Internet bloggers, well, it was unbearable. Smiling through tonight's reception would be no better, two hours of club soda and stale hors d'oeuvres while she wondered what people were saying behind her back. She pulled her desk phone toward her, but then slowly withdrew her hand and reached instead into her bottom file drawer for her Coach bag. She dropped her cell phone in the bag, dug out her keys. She wouldn't call ahead, she decided. She would just show up.

Kevin's apartment was in a fine old high-ceilinged home in the Paseo District not far from the capitol. The neighborhood was artsy and run-down, most of the beautiful old homes divided into apartments, but the area was on a gentrification upswing. Kevin had taken the ground floor of a decrepit three-story monstrosity and turned it into a cream and chrome gem. Monica considered that he might not be home this early, but his black Jetta was parked in the drive, and when she climbed the steps to the broad porch, she could hear Phoebe Snow singing “Poetry Man” in the living room. Kevin and his retro-everything taste. She rang the bell, waited, rang again. Disappointed, thinking that perhaps his Special Company was still here, she turned to leave, but the door opened. Kevin was barefoot, wearing jeans and a soft dove-gray sweater. He studied her quizzically a moment, shook his head.

“What?” she said.

“When are you ever going to believe me that I know what looks best on you?”

Monica resisted the urge to reach up with both hands to cover her rinse-dulled hair. “How's Sniffy?”

“Sniffy,” Kevin said, “is perfect!” He opened the door wide for her to come in, motioned her to the cream-colored sofa, where his long-haired teacup Chihuahua lay nestled on a throw pillow, and continued toward the kitchen, flinging over his shoulder, “We're looking a tad furfuffled, aren't we?”

“Bitch of a day,” she answered. Sniffy was gazing up at her with his dark marble-round eyes, his too-long tongue protruding, as always, from his too-tiny mouth. “What was wrong with him?” she called out. Kevin's muffled voice echoed from the far side of the kitchen.

“Pancreatitis.”

“Aw, poor baby.” She heard cupboard doors opening and closing.

“He's fine now,” Kevin called. “Thank God for modern medicine.”

“Hey, Sniffy,” she said. The dog's little rump quivered; she reached for him and settled him in her lap, stroking his silky beige hair. He was extra teeny even for a miniature, but he didn't
yip-yip-yip
like most little dogs—not because he was so well trained but because his too-tiny mouth and too-big tongue kept him from it. He was like a little plush toy, except that he was warm and could move on his own and his coat was infinitely soft. His little doggy poops were no bigger than a baby's thumb. He was always silent. This made him, in Monica's view, the perfect pet.

Kevin appeared in the breezeway holding up a box marked Good Earth Chai Tea in one hand, a bottle of Grey Goose in the other. She pointed to the vodka—she wasn't going to the reception anyway, she could do as she bloody well pleased. Monica relaxed, leaning back to admire the room, its clean lines and sleek surfaces, the minimalist colors: cream and white and brown and beige, here and there an accent of lacquered red or black. The faux fireplace, with its natural gas flames flickering and dancing among the logs, was the most realistic fake fire she'd ever seen. She could smell the pine incense Kevin always burned when he had it lit. Phoebe Snow whined and trilled on the Bose player sitting atop the glass and chrome bookshelf,
I—I—I wish I was a willow,
and Kevin waltzed in, singing accompaniment, with two enormous frosted martini glasses and a bowl of green olives on a chrome tray.

“Okay, babycakes,” he said, settling beside her, leaning over to take Sniffy from her lap. “Talk to me. What is it makes our bitch of a day such a bitch?”

“Long story.” She wasn't sure if she wanted to talk about it. Maybe she just wanted to sit here and relax. “I didn't know if you'd be home yet.”

“No civilized person works past cocktail hour. I told you. Didn't I tell you? My twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: no more cuts after four, no more foil wraps after two thirty.”

“Oh, right, I forgot,” she said. A little wave of guilt swept her. Kevin's birthday last week was the first she'd missed since she'd known him. But he'd held the celebration in the Copa bar at the Habana Inn! She couldn't be seen going in there. He knew that. “Lovely,” she murmured. He'd been telling her for months he was going to start curtailing his hours, which he had the wherewithal to do now, he said, because, in case she hadn't heard, he was, according to the
Gazette's
Best of OKC Awards, officially
the
hottest stylist in Northwest Oklahoma City! “How was your weekend?” Monica asked, meaning,
How did it go with your
tres
,
tres
Special Company?

“Shall we say . . . disappointing.” Kevin suddenly plopped Sniffy back in her lap, jumped up to change the CD player, punching buttons till he had the song he wanted. Chet Baker's too-sweet, breathy voice crooned into the room. “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” Monica leaned back, closed her eyes, caressed the dog. Kevin was perpetually disappointed. Or pretended to be. He was always declaring that he wanted a steady relationship, but Monica knew better. The fact he hadn't found a steady boyfriend in McAlester back in the day made sense—the pool was too small. But he'd lived in the City for nearly five years. The gay community here was relatively large, and most definitely avid. He could have found a partner by now if he really wanted one. Kevin was like her, Monica thought, only interested in a certain sharply defined type of intimacy. Emotional intimacy, that is. Physical intimacy was quite another matter. And never the twain shall meet, Monica thought, taking another sip of her martini.

The kind of intimacy she preferred was precisely the kind she shared with Kevin: comfortable old-shoe familiarity, with none of the sexual tension of male-female relationships or the jealousies and rivalries of same-sex friendships. For years they'd been privy to each other's secrets. They each knew that the face the other presented to the world was but a fragment of the whole—and usually not the most telling fragment. Their relationship, for instance. He was positively her closest friend—far closer, in many ways, than Charlie—but she could hardly present
that
to the world. And Kevin, who'd spent the first sixteen years of his life disguising his truest self, understood her need for discretion. This was part of why their friendship worked, she thought. Neither made the least demand on the other. She rolled her head, releasing the tension in her neck, sipped her drink. What a relief it was, just to sit here.

“How many ways can I say it?” Kevin reached for the plate of olives, crossed his long bronzed feet on the coffee table. “Champagne is
your
color. Why won't you trust me?”

Well, except, for this, of course. How he tried to instruct her where his sense of style was concerned. Yes, it was true, he did have great taste. Everything about the apartment worked. Everything about Kevin worked: his simple, expensive, muted-color clothes, the small jasper stud in his left earlobe. But he didn't understand politics. Or that wasn't fair—he understood well enough; he just preferred living contrary to the flow. Back when he worked at Supercuts in McAlester, his hair had been flaming-lips red and he'd kept it picked out in a fiery, wiry, Afro-looking halo. Now he wore it in a sleek, close-cropped wavy cut, the color a perfectly highlighted, burnished chestnut. Back then, he'd plucked his brows to a deep arch and worn tons of jewelry, as if he had to be as outrageous as possible in a place that tolerated no outrageousness. Now, he maintained a perfect airbrushed tan year-round, was otherwise unadorned, completely subtle and sexy in his soft, slim-fit clothes. He'd embedded himself in a community where he could have presented himself as flamboyantly as he might want, and so he no longer needed to. “Champagne Ice,” he said. “It brings out your eyes.”

Monica sighed. “I told you, Kev. It's too dramatic.”

“Since when is dramatic bad? Come here, baby.” And he took his dog back. Monica didn't trouble herself to repeat what she'd said already so many times—she had a conservative image to uphold. Kevin pooh-poohed image, even though he groomed his own as carefully as any
Entertainment Tonight
personality. She leaned over and whisked away the olive plate he'd balanced on his stomach next to Sniffy. “I have three things to say about Champagne Blonde.” She popped an olive in her mouth. “Malibu Barbie. Dumb blonde jokes. Norma Zimmer.”

“Who's Norma Zimmer?”

“The Champagne Lady on Lawrence Welk.”

Kevin laughed.

They'd met the first month after Charlie moved her to McAlester. She had been dismayed to discover the dearth of hair salons as well as restaurant choices and had stalked into Supercuts in the strip mall that day in a fit of pique, anticipating a total hack job—she would show her husband just what he'd done, moving her to the effing outback! But Kevin, delighted to find someone from “back east” in his small town, had waltzed around the beautician's chair and within ten minutes had given her the best cut she'd had since she used to travel to Chicago to get her hair done. They'd been buddies ever since. One day, over sandwiches in Jana's Tea Room on Carl Albert Parkway, their twice-weekly ritual, she'd said offhandedly, “You're too talented to stay in this little podunk town, Kev.” “Yes,” he'd answered. “Too talented, and entirely too queer.” She'd never dreamed he'd go off and leave her. Two weeks later he'd announced that he was moving to the City to work and save money for the big move, New York or L.A., he hadn't decided yet which. In Oklahoma City, though, Kevin had found a place, a life; he'd quit making plans to flee to the coast. “Why would I? I've got everything right here! Everything but a steady boyfriend—and the cost of living is so cheap!” Stroking Sniffy's back now, he narrowed his eyes critically, examining her crown. “At least let me put some highlighting back in. You look like you've had your head dipped in an iced tea vat.”

“All right!” she said. “I'll call Sherry tomorrow and make an appointment.”

Mollified, he reached for his martini. “So tell me again. What's got your panties in such a twist.”

“You've seen the news.”

“You know I only watch
Dancing with the Stars.
”

She started to tell him how cable news had glommed onto the story and wouldn't leave it alone, but Kevin interrupted her before she'd got past describing the kid's picture. “I keep telling you, darling—why don't you leave those poor Mexicans alone?”

She frowned at him. The problem was the kid, not the Mexicans, but she began her presentation list: how illegal aliens don't pay taxes but use taxpayer-supported public services, how they take jobs from legal citizens, how much it costs the state to educate their children . . . her voice trailed away. She felt incredibly bored. Maybe she'd repeated it too many times. “Kevin, for God's sake, it's not about them, it's about me. I'm the focus of too much hyped press, or my work is. I've just got to finesse it.”

“Well,” he said soothingly, “this calls for fortification.” He tucked Sniffy in her lap again, cupped a martini glass in each hand and went to the kitchen to fix them another. She watched the archway a moment, glanced up at the large chrome abstract Roman numeral clock dominating the west wall, then hunted around until she found Kevin's remote where he'd secreted it in a console drawer. She pointed it toward the small flatscreen in the corner, but didn't click it on. Before Kevin returned with fresh drinks and a plate of cheese and grapes, she'd replaced the remote in the drawer, kicked off her heels, and was sitting with her eyes closed and her stocking feet on the coffee table, petting Sniffy. She opened her eyes, smiled. She was, she decided, a little drunk. Nevertheless, she accepted the martini. “Thank you, good sir.”

“You are welcome, good lady. Something else is nagging your little gut. Speak.”

“Nothing. It's nothing.” She tilted her glass, peered through it at the fireplace. “Charlie wants me to go down there. To McAlester at least. Take back the narrative, he says, like anybody could do that. It's a freaking freight train.” She took a languid sip. “He wants me to hold a press conference. On the steps of the county courthouse, no doubt. Like every other original thinker.”

“And? This is a problem?”

She shook her head. Of course not. Press conferences were her forte. She was just . . . tired. And the focus was so unpredictable. And Leadership was so skittish. Charlie thought the whole thing was great. Of course, Charlie was one who believed there was no such thing as bad publicity. She wished she could say the same for House Leadership. She snorted a laugh, thinking of her husband hunkered over his laptop last night:
They're foaming at the mouth, babe! You've got to harness their energies, their passion. It's perfect, babe!

“What?” Kevin said.

“Oh, nothing. Charlie's just so sure it's a win. He's got his finger on the pulse of the conservative blogs, but I keep trying to tell him, they're not the whole public. They're the most passionate, like Charlie says, and they're right, of course, but, I don't know . . . it could be dicier than he thinks. I'm a little worried.”