Mad River

17

Virgil drove all the way back to Marshall, still with the lights, running fast. Sally was gone, so he set the alarm on his phone, put it on the end table next to his ear, and was asleep when his head hit the pillow.

Sunrise was right around six-thirty, and at seven o’clock, Virgil was back out the door, carrying his duffel bag. The search area would be moving east, he thought, and Sally aside, Marshall was just too far away.

Jenkins and Shrake agreed to meet him at the Bigham Burger King, and from there, they’d head south toward the focus area; they said that a highway patrolman named Cletus Boykin was coming with them. “We can work in two-man teams that way,” Jenkins said. “Boykin’s an old friend of Shrake’s, and Shrake says he’s okay.”

“What does that mean? He’ll kill on command?”

“That, at least,” Jenkins said. “He’ll probably eat the dead, if you tell him to. See you in a half hour.”

In a cold dry spring, before the trees bud out, the morning sun seems to shine white like a silver dime on the horizon, and the clear air over the still-fallow ground gives the prairie a particular bleakness, if your mood is already bleak.

Virgil had a feeling that there’d be shooting before the end of the day, that people who were alive and even feeling good right then, maybe asleep in their beds, would be bleeding into the dirt before the sun went down.

Or maybe already: he called the Bare County sheriff’s department and was told nothing had happened yet, but that Duke’s forces were moving into position. Sometime in the middle of the night, the cell phone used by Becky Welsh had been found, and bagged, in case further proof was needed that she’d made the phone call.

Forty minutes after he left Marshall, running hard again, Virgil arrived at the Burger King and found Jenkins, Shrake, and Boykin drinking coffee among the remains of a nasty breakfast. Boykin was a thin, athletic man with white hair and sun wrinkles; he was wearing his highway patrol uniform. Virgil left his Minnesota atlas with them, and since he suspected that he might not eat again, and since the place offered the full menu twenty-four hours a day, he ordered a Double Whopper with cheese, large fries, and a Diet Coke; the bloat alone would carry him through to the evening.

When he was back at the booth, working on the Whopper and fries, Shrake, who had his face in a nutrition menu, said, “That’s sixteen hundred and fifty calories, right there, most of it grease.”

“Tastes really fuckin’ good, though,” Virgil said. He dabbed at his face with a napkin, wiped his fingers, and opened the atlas. “Okay. Here’s the situation. The Bare County people think they’ve got Sharp and Welsh in a net that’s roughly like this.” He traced a circle on the map with a pencil. “My focus group thinks they’ll be a little further south of that-south of Arcadia-and a bit west. The feeling was that they’d drop out of Bare County around here, after robbing that bank and Sharp getting shot.”

They talked about the search pattern and tactics, and Virgil made sure they’d all be wearing their vests, which Jenkins and Shrake didn’t like to do, and that the two teams would stay close, in case one of them needed support.

“If you don’t wear the vests, I’ll shoot you myself, just to make the point,” Virgil said. Shrake would go with his friend Boykin, and Virgil would go with Jenkins. Shrake referred to Boykin as “Mad Dog” and “Pit Bull” and Virgil said, “You can call him anything you want, but I’m not gonna ask you why.”

“Jesus, you’ve gotten pretty touchy,” Shrake said.

“Lot of dead people,” Virgil muttered.

“There are always a lot of dead people,” Shrake said. “You can see them on TV all day. Little children fucked and chopped to pieces by freaks. Every day, sure as the sun rises, somewhere in the world, a little child-”

“Shut up,” Virgil said.

“-will be slaughtered, and the TV people will find it and put it on your breakfast table. I’ve managed to handle that fact by deciding that I no longer give a shit.”

Jenkins said to Virgil, “Don’t encourage him. He’s been on this rant for two weeks now.”

“It’s not a rant. It’s my new meme,” Shrake said. “I’m passing it to others.”

He pronounced it “mem,” and Jenkins said, “How many times do I have to tell you-”

“Meem,” Shrake said. “It’s my new meem. Hey, and I’m thinking about going on a vegan diet-”

“Ah, for Christ sakes, let me ride with Virgil,” Boykin said.

“Let’s go,” Virgil said.

Outside, Shrake said to Virgil, “You have a tendency to try to do the right thing. If you have a chance, you’ll try to save these kids’ asses, and you could get shot doing that. Don’t be too softhearted. If you run into them, let the kids call the cards.”

“You-wear your vest,” Virgil said.

They started out in the middle of the focus area and spiraled outward. The farmhouses were generally a quarter to a half mile apart, usually not too far off the road, although some were set well back. They’d approach with the flashing lights, stop in the farmyard, and wait for somebody to come out of the house; occasionally, they’d find somebody already out working. The two teams leapfrogged each other, instead of going in opposite directions, so help would always be only a minute or two away.

At the first house they came to, Virgil stayed in the truck while Jenkins got out on the side opposite the farmhouse. It couldn’t be seen from inside the house, but he was carrying an M14A1, a modified, fully automatic M14 military rifle that had been taken from a Canadian drug dealer a couple of years before. The rifle fired.308 rounds with better penetrating power than M16-based weapons, and would be useful for blowing holes through farmhouse walls.

A minute after they showed up, a mixed-breed dog that looked like it might be mostly Aussie came running around from behind the barn and started barking at them, but stood off ten yards as it barked. Virgil decided he would not want to mess with it. A few seconds later, a farmer edged nervously out of the house, his hands in the air, and yelled, “Hey, Bob. Sit down. Sit down.” The dog sat down. Virgil shouted, “Sir, could you come all the way over here? We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

When the farmer had come right up to him, Virgil confirmed in a low voice that he and his family were okay-“If your family is being held, we’ll go away, and we’ll be back with reinforcements and get you out.”

“We’re okay. I’ve got my twelve-gauge handy, and if they show up here, they won’t be walking away.”

“You take care,” Virgil said. “They might not come driving up and knock on the door-they might come sneaking out of a field and jump you when you’re walking out to the car. They’re killers.”

“We’re all locked up tight and my cousin’s coming up from Worthington in a couple hours with his guns. And we’ve got the dog out in the yard. Not much gets by him.”

“Don’t shoot each other,” Virgil said. “Or the dog.”

Before they left, Virgil asked if the farmer had seen any unusual activity, or lack of activity, at local houses. He hadn’t, and said his neighbors were staying in touch, even people who didn’t like each other.

Shrake called from down the road and said they’d cleared their first farmhouse.

It went like that all morning. In only two cases was there nobody home. In each case, they were able to locate the owners by phone and confirm that the house should be empty.

In one case, a farm couple emerged from the house wearing gun belts with leg tie-downs. They competed in Western shooting competitions, they said, and were not too worried.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Duke called and said they had a possibility, and were setting up around the farmhouse. They knew there were people inside, because they’d been seen: but nobody had come out, and they’d ignored orders to come out.

Virgil’s group broke off and drove north through Arcadia to join Duke’s people. When they got there, they found fifty cops around the farmhouse, and out on the lawn, which was dotted with metal windmills and whirligigs. A couple of horses watched from an adjacent pasture, where an Owens cabin cruiser sat on fifty-five-gallon drums, a long way from any water big enough to float it.

“Can’t get an answer out of them,” Duke said.

The media showed up, but were kept way back, except for a helicopter that buzzed over a couple of times. Duke went off to brief the TV people, who were getting impatient, pushing toward five o’clock deadlines. Another TV helicopter showed. Virgil saw a curtain moving in the front room window a couple of times, and once thought he saw the flash of a face.

The scene began to take on the aspect of a carnival, as more and more cops and soldiers came in, but then, around four o’clock, a frightened farm couple showed up and said that the people inside were almost certainly their four foster children, all teenagers, and all of whom were mentally challenged.

The farmer’s name was Arnie Schmidt, who told Duke, “They’re okay on their own, good with chores and so on, and wouldn’t hurt a flea, really good kids, but they’re probably scared to death. We told them today not to go out and not to let anybody in, because of these crazies. . I’m going to walk up there on the lawn and see if they’ll come out to me.”

Schmidt had been at a co-op and heard about the ruckus from a neighbor, picked up his wife from her job at the phone company, and had driven out as quickly as they could.

Duke told them he couldn’t be responsible if they got hurt, and told them to stay well back down the lawn until they determined that there was nobody in the house but the children.

Schmidt immediately violated that, walking straight up to the front porch, while one of Duke’s deputies yelled at him not to go so far; Duke said, “All that media’s gonna be laughing at us, if all we’ve got is a house full of retards.”

Virgil said, “You know what Ronald Reagan said about that.”

Duke: “What’s that?”

“Fuck ’em.”

Duke disapproved. “I don’t allow my men to use that kind of language.”

“Good thing I’m not one of your men,” Virgil said. “Look at that: they’re coming out.”

Four kids came out of the house, all boys, maybe ten to fourteen, the two tallest ones trying to explain to Schmidt what they’d done, the smaller ones crying as they looked at the circle of cars and trucks around them. Schmidt and his wife tried to calm them down, and the carnival packed up and in a half hour had gone away.

Shrake, sitting on the fender of Boykin’s patrol car, said, “Well, that was enlightening.”

“Another day on the job,” Virgil said. “Let’s get going.”

They stopped in Arcadia to pick up Cokes and went back to work; they quit at six o’clock, having cleared an area of about five miles by five. If they’d worked another couple of hours, they would have found Welsh and Sharp, huddled in the old dead man’s house at the top of the hill.

But then, working in the dark, they might have gotten themselves killed.

Becky and Jimmy were still hiding in the farmhouse, working their way through the bags of junk food that Becky had brought back from the convenience store. The night had been rough, with Jimmy’s leg pulsing with pain. Becky rationed the pain pills, hoping to keep the pain at least bearable until they could get out of the area.

Jimmy said he couldn’t move yet, and when he woke in the morning, and she washed his leg down, it seemed to her that the wound was starting to smell funny; and not in a ha-ha way. Some blood was still seeping into the bandage, but there was now a massive clot in place, and she was careful not to disturb it as she washed around the edges of it. The edges were yellow and puffy, but when she tentatively pried at them, she got blood instead of pus. She sprayed on a lot of the Band-Aid antiseptic, and re-bandaged it.

Jimmy said, “You know, you would have made a good nurse.”

She said, “Thanks,” and she really appreciated the thought.

They spent the day in front of the television, watching the search. The TV people kept them up to date on the area where the hunt was going on, and while it wasn’t far away, it wasn’t close enough that they felt threatened. They had no hint of Virgil and his crew, who were much closer.

They talked about what they were going to do. Jimmy thought when they got better, they’d get in the old man’s truck and head south. He’d once been to Missouri with his old man, and there was some rough country down there, where they might get lost for a while. He’d grow a beard and get some overalls so he’d look like a farmer, and when things had quieted down, they’d head farther south.

He’d decided they wouldn’t go to Cuba or South America because the people there spoke Spanish. They’d go to Australia, he decided, because they spoke English there, and clicking around the TV channels, they came on a National Geographic special about Australia that made the whole place seem so neat that Becky got all excited and cried at the prospect. “Maybe I could be a nurse, in Australia,” she said.

Jimmy hadn’t looked at any more of the pornos, maybe because of the pain, or maybe because he was embarrassed by them, and when Becky steered the conversation around to their future relationship, he seemed happy enough to talk about it.

Becky asked, “You like me, right?”

“Sure. I always liked you,” Jimmy said.

“It’s just that, you know. . we’ve only done it a couple times, and you always seemed to like that other thing better.”

“All men like the other thing better,” Jimmy said. “But you know, doing it, we just haven’t had a lot of time. There didn’t seem to be a good place, either.”

“That’s the only way you can have kids, though,” she observed.

He was silent for a while after that, and finally she asked, “Don’t you want to have kids?”

He said, “Don’t know. Maybe.” After a while, he said, “Tell you one thing, if we ever have kids, we won’t treat them like we was. I mean, we’d be strict, but no hitting in the head, or anything like that.”

Another long silence, then she said, “Did your old man do that?”

Jimmy showed some teeth in a grin and said, “One time, when I was about ten years old, I was sitting in the dinner chair and I said, ‘I really hate these peas, they’re all runny,’ and he whacked me with his hand right on the side of the head, and I flew into the wall, I think, and it was like an hour later when I woke up on the floor. My goddamn head hurt for, like, two weeks. Dizzy, throwing up. When I got better, I thought about sneaking into his bedroom at night and killing the old sonofabitch. I’m glad I got to do that, finally. Got to do it before I die.”

“We aren’t gonna die,” Becky said.

Jimmy said, “Yeah, well,” and gestured at the TV, which was showing an aerial shot of a cluster of cop cars and army Humvees at an intersection, and a long line of cars stopped behind them.

“We’re going to Australia,” Becky said, trying to show some confidence.

They watched for a while, clicking around channels, and Jimmy said, “That beer sure was good. That hit the spot.”

She helped him get into the bathroom and get his pants down so he could pee, and caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, and when he’d finished, and zipped up, she asked, “You think I’m pretty?”

“You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever talked to,” he said. The truth was shining from his eyes, and she thought, it’d all been worth it, just to hear that.

Later in the day, as the sun was going down, she made some Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, but Jimmy had trouble hanging on to the spoon, so she fed him, and then he went to sleep on the couch. He was sleeping soundly when she started to get sleepy herself, so she put a blanket on him, and wrapped herself in a couple more blankets and a couple of sheets, and went to sleep on the floor next to the couch.

At two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy moaned, a long, low, blood-curdling moan that sounded right up next to death.