The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Seventeen

August, 1986

Maybe it was the heat-110 degrees on the thermometer that was screwed to an outside corner of the barn-that propelled him into following Patrick that summer day. Or maybe it was the fact that for three days out of the last five, Patrick had vanished from the fields where they were both supposed to be baling hay, leaving Rex to sweat through the work alone.

Despite the fact that he felt resentful enough to stick Patrick’s face in a water trough and drown him, Rex hadn’t complained about it to his parents. That wouldn’t do anything except bring parental wrath down on his own head. They had never allowed the brothers to come running to them to settle fights; from an early age, the boys were instructed to settle it themselves or to stew over it privately, their choice. So even when his father yelled at them that they weren’t getting enough work done fast enough to please him, Rex’s eyes had shot pitchforks at his older brother, but he’d kept his mouth shut while his parents were around. He figured his father wasn’t stupid. Nathan could read the signs. He knew he had one hardworking, sporadically dutiful son and one lazy-ass, rebellious one. Even if Nathan didn’t know the precise nature of the disagreement this time, he surely knew Patrick was the cause of it. But he still expected Rex to handle his complaints on his own. He also expected the hay to get put up while the weather held, whether both brothers did their shares or one brother did it alone. It was one of the prices the brothers paid for having a father who also held a full-time job as the county sheriff. Without two strong sons to work in his place, Nathan could never have pulled it off.

When the mechanism of the baler got clogged up for the second damn time in the past hour, Rex stopped the big machine. When he opened the door of it he realized that all the fields were quiet except for the buzzing of insects. There should have been the low roar of another baler. He looked over at the next field for the dust his brother should have been raising. All he saw was heat rising from the field. That was the last straw for him.

Furious, he flung himself out of the cab, down to the prickly ground, and stalked off to where his old secondhand beat-up truck was parked at the far end at the gate.

He got in his truck, peeled off toward the next field, and found that Patrick’s old truck was gone again. Where the hell does he go? Rex fumed. Probably off to one of his equally worthless friends’ houses to hide out in air-conditioning and drink beer for a couple of hours. Or off to visit one of the infinite number of girls who always seemed willing to put up with his good-looking, no-good self.

And how do I think I’m going to find him?

It dawned on Rex that if he didn’t know where his brother had disappeared to, then he probably couldn’t find him, at least not without taking a couple of hours to do nothing but drive from one possible place to another. And it wasn’t like Patrick was stupid enough to park his truck out in front of somebody’s house, or a bar, where their father or one of his deputies would be likely to see it.

With a string of curses, Rex turned his truck around and returned to the field where he was supposed to be working. Maybe he couldn’t find Patrick today, but he thought he knew how to find him the next time he did this.

For two days in a row, Patrick worked the way he was supposed to, as if he had calibrated exactly how much slack he had before their father might come roaring home to check on them. But then on the third day, he vanished mid-afternoon again.

This time, Rex was ready for him.

He had watched his brother’s work like a hawk since the last time, throwing constant beady-eyed glances in that direction, on alert for the moment when the dust in that field stopped rising and moving.

When he saw it happen, he immediately shut down his own machine.

He ran to his truck and was on the road, following Patrick’s dust before his brother could get so far ahead that he was impossible to follow.

Mitch’s parents owned a place that bordered the far western edge of the Shellenbergers’ much bigger spread, in the section across the highway. Rex was totally surprised when his brother drove in the back way to the Newquists’ small ranch. The main entrance-with a wrought-iron gate-was around a bend in the road to the west. This back way was the one that he and Mitch always used on the rare times they spent any time at the place. Mostly, the Newquists’ ranch was only used by Mitch’s parents for entertaining out-of-town judges and lawyers who were easily impressed by a cattle ranch of any size, even if it only had a few dozen head of cows on it. To people from the city, five hundred acres sounded huge. The Shellenberger spread was closer to ten thousand acres. But then, the Shellenbergers ran a real, operating ranch, not just a showplace.

Rex had no idea in the world what his brother could be doing there.

It couldn’t be good, though. He had a sudden, awful vision of his brother and friends using the elegant little ranch house for parties. Patrick would know it was empty most of the time. They could break in and trash the place without the Newquists ever knowing it until it was too late to stop them. Rex doubted that it would bother Patrick’s alleged conscience in the least to think of using property, even of family friends, in such a shabby way.

His truck bounced over the rough terrain, while anxiety ate at his stomach…anxiety and glee, because this might turn out to be the one offense his parents couldn’t forgive. Could a sheriff overlook a serious act of vandalism by his own son? Could he overlook breaking and entering? Patrick might have to be charged with a crime. Patrick might have to go to jail. Rex stepped harder on the gas in anticipation of that exhilarating possibility.

He didn’t remember a time when he didn’t hate Patrick.

Rex felt as if he had hated his older brother on sight. His earliest memories were of Patrick tormenting him in some way or other, and of feeling furious and helpless to do anything about it. He figured Pat must have hated him on sight, too-the younger brother coming along to take his place.

So maybe it was understandable, in a way.

But that didn’t make it forgivable, not when you were the younger, smaller, vulnerable brunt of it, and not when your parents never did anything stronger to protect you from it than to snap, “Patrick, stop it.”

Patrick never stopped it. Rex hoped he went to fucking prison.

When Rex finally came around a bend and saw the Newquists’ ranch house, he was surprised to see only Patrick’s truck there, instead of a whole slew of his friends.

Instead of barreling onto the scene, he backed up, and parked among some trees.

After looking around to make sure that Patrick wasn’t anywhere in sight, Rex began to work his way down and around to the house, keeping to the shade of the trees and the outbuildings to hide his presence there.

When he got closer, he heard music coming through the open windows.

Party, he thought, hoping it was true, after all.

It wasn’t that he wished damage on his best friend’s property, it was that he wished damage on his brother. If Mitch was with him, he’d be thinking the same thing. Patrick had never been any nicer to Rex’s friends than he was to his brother. When Abby was little, Patrick could make her cry in about ten seconds flat, and that, alone, had made Rex and Mitch want to kill him.

With murder very much on his mind, Rex sneaked up to the window where the loudest sound of music seemed to be coming from. He flattened himself against the side of the house and peered around to see in. It was a bedroom, but there was no person in it, so he kept going from window to window until he finally saw his brother’s broad, bare, tanned, muscular back, the back that made otherwise sensible girls go all swoony when they saw him at the county swimming pool.

Bare chested, in jeans and cowboy boots, Patrick was talking to someone else in the room.

When his brother took a step to the side, Rex saw who it was, and he couldn’t have been more surprised. Or disappointed. Really disappointed to the point of feeling stabbed and betrayed, even if he didn’t have a right to be. It was a girl named Sarah who used to work as a housecleaner in a lot of homes in Small Plains. She was Patrick’s age, Rex knew, and she was from another town about twenty-five miles away.

Rex understood why she used to drive all that way to work.

Or at least he understood it after Abby explained it to him one time.

“There’s nothing wrong with cleaning people’s houses,” Abby had said, looking earnest, “but I wouldn’t want to do it in my own hometown, not if I didn’t have to. Or, like, if I lived in a city, I wouldn’t want to do it in my own neighborhood. If that’s what I had to do to make money, I’d go someplace else, too.”

“That’s stupid,” he’d declared.

“No, it’s not! If some girl we know did that, you think that kids wouldn’t be mean to her about it?”

Rex had thought at the time, but didn’t say to Abby, that if any girl they knew was as beautiful as Sarah was, she could do practically anything she wanted to do, and it wouldn’t matter what anybody said about it. Abby was pretty, really pretty, but Sarah was from a whole different planet of beauty, in Rex’s opinion. With her dark hair and pale, perfect skin, with her kind of weird but beautiful light blue eyes that slanted up a little, and her big boobs and flat stomach and long legs, he thought she was just about the sexiest, most incredible-looking girl he’d ever seen outside of a movie screen. But maybe he didn’t know about how kids in her own hometown would treat her. He wasn’t a teenage girl. Maybe Abby was right. Plus, he’d heard that there was trouble with Sarah’s family, so maybe she had other reasons for traveling twenty-five miles to work.

As Rex stood, feeling dumbfounded, at the window, she saw him.

Because of the look on her face, Patrick turned around, and saw him, too.

“You little bastard,” he yelled, “you sneaking little bastard!”

Patrick moved fast, running toward the front door, then onto the porch, then around to where Rex stood rooted to the ground.

He stood like a cement statue when Patrick grabbed him by the shoulders, and half pulled, half pushed him. “What the fuck are you doing here? Did you follow me? Listen to me, you stupid kid, if you tell Dad about this, I’ll kill you!”

“Tell him about what?” Rex said, starting to come to life again.

He pushed his brother away, which made Patrick push him again.

“I’m warning you, don’t say one word about seeing me here. You don’t know I was here, you don’t know anything about Sarah being here, you were never here!”

“Okay, I was never here,” Rex said, ducking out of the way.

He backed up until he was out of reach. Although he was no longer a “little” brother, although he was within an inch of Patrick’s height, he was still a string bean compared to his brother’s more filled-out body. At nineteen, only a week away from heading off to college, Patrick looked like a man. At seventeen, soon to be eighteen, Rex still looked like a teenage boy. But he felt man enough to say, in a low, taunting voice he hardly recognized as his own, “I was never here-if you never come back here.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Patrick moved threateningly forward.

“Just what I said.” Rex stood his ground. “If I ever see you leave the fields again and come over here, I won’t keep quiet about it. You stay there doing the work you’re supposed to do, and I’ll keep my mouth shut about this forever.”

“You wouldn’t tell them, you little fucker.”

“Try me, asshole.”

Patrick hesitated, and Rex knew he’d won. At last, he’d won a battle with his brother! He knew he’d probably have to pay for it someplace down the line, but for right now, it felt terrific.

Then he glanced in through the screened window and saw her.

She had moved back into shadows inside the house, but he could see her eyes staring out at him. He couldn’t read them. There weren’t any answers or explanations in them, not that she owed him any.

He was suddenly painfully aware of how filthy he was, how smelly and sweaty.

He turned back to look at his brother.

“Well,” he said, a little cockier than was safe for him, but he couldn’t help but swagger anyway. “You coming? We’ve got extra work to do today, thanks to you screwing around over here.”

Patrick looked as if he felt as murderous as Rex had felt when he drove over.

“Yeah, I’m coming. I’ve got to get my shirt.”

Rex walked back to his truck, feeling so victorious it was all he could do not to pump his fist. But just to be sure, he didn’t leave the property until he saw that his brother was right behind him. They finished their separate baling jobs, went home, ate supper, and went their ways that night, without speaking to each other.

Their parents noticed only the relative peace, and not the animosity.

When Patrick left for K-State, Rex drove back to the Newquists’ ranch.

He didn’t expect to find her there. He hadn’t told Mitch or anybody else about seeing her there. So he was shocked, yet again, when he drove up and she opened the front door.

She was living there, she told him that day.

It was a secret from certain people, and she asked him to swear not to tell anyone.

Eventually, he went out to see her so often that she presented him with periodic lists of supplies for things she needed or wanted, which was how Rex happened to purchase a red scrunchie for her long dark hair.