Patience County War (Madeleine Toche Series) (4 page)

“Were you with the 101st at Bastonne, Mr. Dupree?” Koots asked.

“Nobody remembers that. Yah, I was there.” Dupree said in a faraway wistful voice.

“Me too,” Koots said quietly.

“What! I didn’t know you were Airborne.”

Without hesitation, the men walked towards each other, embraced, and met like old friends who started talking a mile a minute.

Sam’s jaw hit the floor. These men had just traveled through time. They weren’t pushing eighty anymore, they were fire-eating Airborne Rangers again.

Sam sighed a little in relief. Apparently neither man had any carnal designs on the goat and chicken populations of Patience County. If they did, Sam was certain that they would restrict their activities to the animals they raised for breeding purposes. Sam laughed out loud at his own bad pun, thinking how dangerous random rumors could be regardless of how far-fetched.

Sam said, “I’ll leave you guys to work it out then.”

Neither man seemed to notice at all, so Sam just walked quietly out the door and over to his car. People are amazing, he thought. Not only had he brought two neighbors together, but he was sure these guys would be best of friends. Even though he hadn’t really done much, it made him feel damn good to see it. The exchange had been just the thing to see the sunny side of things.

Sam jumped back into the squad and headed to the Sheriff’s station for his routine check in. His office was housed in an old concrete building on the far end of town from the shops and business offices. He passed friends on the street, making the required head nod or finger wave. He and his buddies often joked about it when they passed a farmer on a tractor and got the single digit lifted off the steering wheel salute. He smiled when he pulled up to the squat ugly concrete and cinder block building that looked more like an errant fortification than a city office. Rommel would have approved, Sam thought as he got out of the vehicle. There were places where the walls were three feet thick and rebar reinforced.

Lisa Coleman, the receptionist, greeted Sam as he walked in the door.

“What are people doing to each other today?” It was the same thing Sam asked her every day, always hoping for the same answer.

“Nothing new today, but your mother called to remind you about Sunday dinner.”

“Thanks Lisa, she always does.”

The informal, Patience County Traveling Pot Luck, had been a tradition dating back to the civil war. Many of the same families still attended. Sam’s father showed up after he started dating Sam’s mother. At their third pot luck together, Sam’s parents snuck off together down to a nearby swimming hole. Skinny dipping remained one of his parent’s favorite activities together. Sam’s uncles hadn’t liked that very much and Sam’s father hadn’t bothered to put his clothes back on when he took Sam’s three uncles on. The young men fought to a standstill and an understanding. After that, Sam’s uncles kept all other suitors away. That skinny paratrooper was tough as hell and he was their brother now. The fight was still laughed and joked about.

There were always lots of people and a huge feed moving from house to house among their friends and family. By the end of the week at least a
dozen people had reminded him of where it was. They were there when he left Patience and there when he came back.

Sam rambled back through the neatly organized sheriff’s station, with its offices in the front and few jail cells in the back. There was little need to hold people at the station, as the courthouse had a separate detention facility for those offenders serving county jail time or waiting to appear in court. That arrangement allowed Sam and his deputies to attend to their duties and not have to take care of prisoners. He didn’t think most people needed to be held anyway. If they were violent and had to be held, the courthouse was best. If not, Sam could always provide them with many good reasons to leave his county, very few of which were in any handbook anywhere. Sam checked his messages and the duty roster. Satisfied, he headed back out the door.

“I hereby declare the world safe for democracy,” Sam announced.

“It is until you get back in that squad, sheriff,” Lisa joked.

Sam jumped back into his car and drove a few blocks over to TJ’s Auto to gas up. TJ was a close friend of Sam’s father John and had been with him in Vietnam in a unit that saw more than its share of combat. After the war, TJ kind of drifted around and got into stupid trouble, drinking and fighting. He was a tough kid from East L.A., and had been born into one of the tougher gangs. He often joked he’d been in combat all his life. He did some jail time, dried up for a while and then repeated the pattern. John had heard about TJ’s troubles and went to find him. John knew that TJ just lacked a sense of purpose, having come from less than nothing before the war, some inner city slum. When the war was over he had nowhere to go and nothing to do. That was a perfect recipe to get any man in trouble. TJ was a natural mechanic and had learned about engines as a child in the shop of a decent man in his neighborhood who he still called his uncle. The man was long dead, but when TJ was temporarily stumped or couldn’t figure something out, he’d say “I bet ol’ Uncle Gary would have figured it out already.” Sam had driven all manner of vehicles in the military and in police life, from the most rugged military Humvees to luxury cars that cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but he liked his squad the best. It was a 1990 Ford Crown Victoria, one of the old interceptors. TJ had taken one purchased at an auction in another county and altered it some. It was capable of producing over 800 horsepower on a modified frame and could go at least 160 mph as long as you didn’t want to turn. It had bullet proof
everything and had solid rubber tires. It drank gas like a dragster and could be geared low enough to tow a river barge if need be. The engine was air, water, and oil cooled, turbo charged with ram air injection. It was downright silly and that’s why Sam loved it.

When he pulled in TJ gave him a wry grin and shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“Fill ‘er up,” Sam sang out as he jumped out of the vehicle and clapped TJ on the back, “with the special juice.”

“Special juice my ass, Sam. I told you before racing fuel is for racing.”

“Then let’s go racing,” Sam winked. He knew TJ was the man to see. When TJ drove one of his antique honeys, everybody looked.

“I’d feel safer in the jungle with the enemy than on the back of a bicycle with you,” TJ said smiling and wagging a finger at Sam.

“You have a point.”

It wasn’t that Sam was a bad driver, but in the last four years he had sunk the squad twice and on two separate occasions had landed in a cornfield in pursuit of a suspect. It was times like these that made him glad that TJ was his friend. The squad had a distinctive throttle sound when it kicked down. On a still night the sound carried. No other car was like it. When people heard it they knew that Sam was on patrol. It was one of those echoes in the night, like a train off in the distance. People told him they liked hearing the squad, knowing he was on the job.

The squad had a normal, bench-style front seat and two separate seats in the back. One for a normal sized passenger and one that looked like it was made for a giant.

There were so many dents in the squad that TJ just replaced the shell every so often, so that from the outside it looked at least halfway normal. Its color was mostly black and tan. The lights on top were bolted to the heavy duty frame and needed to be replaced constantly. Sam had cleaned Patience County up when he returned. Nobody seemed to care about the repair bills.

TJ hopped into the car and drove it around back where the stash of high octane racing fuel was kept. Sam walked to the front of the station and onto the small porch where two ancient men intermittently played checkers and ribbed one another mercilessly. They were the same two men who had been there when Sam left at eighteen and they were still there when he came home at forty two. They looked the same, spoke the same and still called him boy, unless it was ‘official’. Then they called him Sheriff. They
were both a little crazy and convinced that the Catholics in town were trying to get them. They never offered an explanation as to their religious persecution and Sam wisely didn’t ask, but he never ignored them. They saw everything and seemed to have crystal clear recall for details concerning people ‘not from around here’.

“Howdy, gents,” Sam said.

“Boy,” was the simultaneous reply.

Sam walked into the shop and the old wooden floor creaked as he walked over to the cooler to get an IBC Root Beer and a bag of cheese puffs. They had been his favorite snack since childhood, when he rode his bike to town or cut through the woods with Nathan avoiding his chores. Another man had owned the filling station then, but it never seemed to change. The interior had the same slanted greasy floor, dirty cracked display cases and tired old Snap-on-Tool calendars on the walls it had thirty years ago. Sam put a couple of dollars on the counter and walked out back to where TJ was fueling the squad.

TJ finished topping off the tank and Sam jumped in and fired up the engine. The engine sounded like a spitfire starting up. Sam smiled and TJ said, “Sunday dinner at your parents.”

It was Sam’s turn for the wry smile and incredulous shake of his head. TJ laughed right out loud. It was always fun to hear TJ’s explosion of mirth and glee. He was a relatively new conscript to Sunday pot luck, having only been around for twenty years or so.

S
am drove the rumbling squad into Nathan Harper’s rutted dirt driveway and came to a stop next to a barn that had once been red. He climbed out and took an appreciative sniff of the air. Nathan’s garden was bursting with growth. Large tomatoes were forming on his vines, which had been staked recently, and fragrant tiny grapes were developing among shiny leaves clinging to the arbor that arched by the barn door.

Sam saw that Nathan’s big farm truck was gone, more than likely making deliveries or hauling packages of the home grown specialty organic products Nathan shipped to restaurants all over the region.

To make sure, Sam walked over to the front door, stuck his head inside and called out. Not hearing a response, Sam figured there was nobody home. Sam and Nathan had free reign in each other’s homes. They were closer than brothers and didn’t bother with asking each other permission for much of anything. Sam walked over to one of Nathan’s barns where the makeshift weight room was set up.

Sam ducked into the barn just as a couple of mice scurried across the floor in search of some discarded grain sack or other morsel. There was dirt and dust everywhere except on the heavy bench press, squat rack and
pull up bar. It was an old fashioned weight pit. No frills. Over in the corner was some of the equipment Nathan used. One was a welded barbell made of a four inch thick iron bar connected to enormous old-fashioned steel tractor wheels. They were heavy enough so that the bar bent considerably under their weight. Nathan was much too broad for a conventional Olympic bar. It didn’t much matter, as he couldn’t fit enough weight on one any way. Sam used on old Olympic weight set they’d trained with for years.

Nathan’s bench presses were done with massive iron barbells that an old time blacksmith made for him in exchange for some chickens and that venom Nathan called moonshine. Sam tried to lift one of the bells just off the floor. He could do it, but it would take two good men to get one into the back of a pickup. Sam was gone when they were made, but the story was that the old smith, applying the wisdom of his years, used a skid-steer loader to deliver them.

Sam’s workout was basic, squats, bench presses, and pull-ups; that was it. Nathan and Sam believed in exercise in moderation. It was easier to make themselves do it. Sam’s real physical talent was his ability to move with loose, fluid ferocity, born of countless hours of running through the woods, swimming in creeks and spending most of his younger years exploring the wild areas near his home. Sam would still often take off for hours into the woods alone, climbing trees, running and just rambling about. When he was young his parents once saw him outside lying face down on the ground with his arms outstretched like he was hugging the earth. Sam could always rejuvenate himself by spending time alone anywhere in the wild. Sometimes old man Trunce would say, “Sam’s gone walkabout again,” for like an aborigine, he had the same uncanny sense of direction and the same wanderlust.

The Trunces and the Harpers were great friends. Nathan, like his father, was a botanist. His father had a PhD. but Nathan was a farmer. While his father taught at the university, Nathan was interested in the practical side of the science. By the time he was in his teens he had spent long hours working with his father doing sophisticated research. When he went to university, he tested out of all but the highest level courses. Nathan spent about eighteen months taking all of the required courses and graduated. He did so more to please his father than himself. Dr. Harper was an academic, and while he didn’t insist that his son obtain a degree, he was openly
proud when he did. Nathan graduated with honors and had the pick of any graduate school of his choice, but he chose farming as his continuing education. Dr. Harper was a decent farmer and a respected scientist, but Nathan could grow things by wiggling his toes in the soil. It was Nathan, who the other farmers called when they had questions. They generally said “could you ask Dr. Harper and Nathan to call around?” Nathan and Dr. Harper both read every journal of importance that came out in the field of botany and conducted all manner of research at the university and at the farm. Nathan was always included in the credits of every paper published. He was a natural organic farmer, and had great interest in natural forms of pest and weed control, crop rotation, and the combination of species to deter insects and disease. Nathan wanted to be able to help feed the world without poisoning it.