The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-four

Mitch was pretty sure he was acting crazy. This was not a good precedent, he thought wryly, as he barreled toward the entrance to the highway on the north edge of town. With the rain coming down on his car, and the worst of the storm ahead of him, he felt like a storm chaser trying to catch up to a twister. This is nuts, he told himself, but how could he just stand by and watch a tornado fly toward her home, and not do anything about it? Was he supposed to just stand in his yard and hope for the best for her? What if she was there alone, what if she got hurt, what if she needed help, and he was the only one who could get there in time? He had to make sure, it was the only decent thing to do. If he got there and saw that everything was okay, he could just quietly drive away, with nobody the wiser.

Nuts. This place is already driving you crazy.

He was on his way to see if Abby had survived the tornado, and he hadn’t even tried to see his father yet. Or, his brother, Jeff, whom he had not laid eyes on since his college graduation, when the boy was only four. I have a brother…

It was how he used to think of Rex, like a brother.

Rex. Mitch tried to think out ahead of time what he would do if he encountered the principals in what he thought of as his own little melodrama, now that he had decided to stick around for a while. What would…could…he say, not only to Abby, but also to Rex, or any of the other people who’d known him years ago? What was his attitude going to be if-more likely, when-he ran into Quentin Reynolds and Nathan Shellenberger? What about Verna, for that matter? And now he had Patrick to consider in his scenarios, as well. What was he going to say to people about why he had left, much less so suddenly, and why he had never returned until now?

He tried imagining it with Rex, albeit a fantasy Rex who had a grown man’s body with a familiar teenager’s face. He tried saying, “Hey, I’m sorry I left like that,” but that wasn’t going to work. If he said he was sorry for anything, he was going to have to explain why. “I’m sorry I left like that, but the thing is, I had just seen your father carry a dead girl into Abby’s house, and then I saw her father…”

Yeah, right. He tried imagining what it might be like to run into the older men.

Immediately, rage welled up inside of him, so that all he could see himself saying was something like, “You goddamned sonsabitches…”

He couldn’t apologize. He couldn’t explain. He couldn’t defend.

He was damned if he was going to employ the defense his mother had used on his behalf. “When people ask why you left like that,” she had written him, “I tell them things were becoming too intense between you and Abby. I tell them we didn’t want you to feel pressured to get married so young, or, God forbid, start a family at your age. I say, we thought it best for you to go away where there are greater opportunities, and different girls to date.”

Upon reading that letter, he had scorched the telephone lines with a call to her, telling her to stop it, telling her not to do that to Abby, who was completely innocent in all this. “How could you?” he had yelled at his mother. “How can you say things that make people think of her like that?”

To which she had cooly replied, “Well, I have to tell them some- thing, Mitch.”

There had been a time, nearly nineteen years of time, when he would never have talked to his mother like that. Out of respect, and because he wouldn’t have dared; he would never have dreamed of raising his voice to her, much less speaking to her in such a harsh tone, with such peremptory, accusatory words. In his family, politeness had reigned. By the time of this phone call, he had lost the respect, if not entirely the fear.

“Not that!” he had yelled at her. “You don’t have to tell them anything. It’s none of their business. But don’t tell them that.”

He had no idea if she paid any attention to him.

Now he was going into a situation where he didn’t know what people thought, what lies had been spread, what stories had been made up to compensate for the truths that had never been told. He decided to take his cues from others, at least while he was still testing the waters, timing his moves. If they were friendly to him, that’s how he would be to them, up to a point that stopped short of reactivating friendships. That wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t happen. If they were cool, he would be, too. He decided his best bet was to be courteous but distant pleasant but unapproachable. That way, nobody could get hurt, or at least not as badly as the truth could hurt them.

He preferred not to think about how his other plans might hurt some of them.

As Mitch turned north on the highway, he had a feeling he had already lost his grip on all that rational planning. Where was it that morning when he had impulsively followed little green arrows to Abby’s place? And where was it now when he was following a tornado, for God’s sake, straight back to her?

“Courteous, aloof, neutrally pleasant,” he reminded himself, out loud. “I’ll be so goddamned pleasant my own ex-wife wouldn’t recognize me.”

He was more than halfway there when he saw something that made him pull over to the side of the road and park. Just ahead of him, there was a Muncie County sheriff’s car that was parked crooked on the shoulder, as if its driver had pulled over in a hurry and left it there. And off in the nearby culvert, a tall man in a uniform was getting to his feet and appearing to dust himself off, a sheriff’s deputy, maybe.

The storm had gone through here in a big way.

Mitch got out of his car, to make sure the deputy was all right.

Rex endured small hailstones pounding on his back, and drenching rain. Wind howled around him, picking up gravel and hurling it at him. He thought he even heard the metal in his car rattle. He wanted to raise his head and look, but didn’t want to take the chance of being blinded by debris.

It seemed to last forever, but when the worst of it was over, he realized he had only been a victim of the more ordinary part of the storm, and not the twister itself. When he did look up and scan the sky for it, he couldn’t even see it, but only spotted the dire black clouds from which it had emerged, receding toward the northeast. Where twisters were supposed to go. Rex looked due north, checking for damage and people and not seeing any. Then he turned to look south and spied one car, a black late-model Saab, parked on the same shoulder where he was.

He watched a tall man get out of the car, and walk toward him.

There was something about the way the man moved that struck a vaguely familiar chord in Rex. It was the aggressive tilt of the broad shoulders, the straightforward carriage of the head that made him think it might be somebody he knew. It brought back memories, for some reason, of playing in football games when he played left tackle, running ahead, making big blocks for their talented tight end…

I’ll be damned…

When the big man got close enough, Rex found himself looking into Mitch’s eyes.

Mitch saw it in Rex’s face, the exact same immediate impulse he felt in the first second when they recognized each other: a natural, almost irresistible impulse to grin. In that instant, the years between them didn’t exist. There was only the same old close friendship, the same chemistry and rapport. There was a flash of amnesia, a wiping out of old sins, a memory only of affection and great times. In that moment, there was only the day before yesterday; yesterday, itself, disappeared. In that moment, they could have slapped each other’s shoulders, they could have shouted, “Goddamn!” and laughed out loud. They could have said, “Where you been?” and laughed about it. They could have taken up right where they had left off.

And in the next instant, Mitch saw Rex cut it off, so he did, too.

Mitch had a sense of being in a twilight zone where he and Rex had seen an open door that they could have stepped through to a different, happier conclusion. Instead, given the choice, they both slammed that door shut. It left them standing in the rain on the shoulder of the highway, staring at each other in wary disbelief at what they couldn’t believe they were seeing with their own eyes, after all these years.

“Mitch,” Rex said, in a neutral tone.

“Yeah. I didn’t know it was you when I pulled up-”

“Or you might not have stopped?” Rex cracked a grin, after all, but a cynical one.

“No, I mean-” He stopped trying. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Rex made a show of knocking mud off his clothes. Mitch sensed he was doing it just so he didn’t have to look him in the eye. “No harm done.” When Rex straightened up again, he said, in the same careful, neutral tone, “I never heard you were coming back-”

“Just for a visit-”

“Sure. Wouldn’t want to stick around.”

“Jesus.” It slipped out of Mitch. He hadn’t meant to react angrily to anything any of them said, but Rex’s sarcasm had poked him into a response. “It’s not that.”

“Whatever. Looks like you’re already heading back the way you came.”

“What?” Mitch realized that Rex meant, you’re driving north. Away. “No, I just…came out to see the storm.”

“Yeah, well, I’m on my way to check on…people in that direction.”

He isn’t even going to say her name to me, Mitch thought.

“Okay, well, I better not keep you from it.”

“You’re not. I guess, if you’re going to be around for a while, I’ll probably see you.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be here.” Mitch paused, then added reluctantly, “My dad doesn’t know I’m here, so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything.”

Rex raised his eyebrows. “You going to tell him?”

“Pretty soon. So…are you a deputy to your dad now?”

“No.” Rex smiled slightly. “He’s retired. I’m it.”

“You’re the sheriff?”

There was another moment then, following Mitch’s incredulous question when they might have laughed together about it, about the idea of either one of them growing up to be a lawman, but again they kept it from happening.

“Yeah, I’m the sheriff.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Rex restrained himself from commenting on that.

“What about you? he asked Mitch.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you do?”

“Some law, some real estate.”

“Sounds lucrative.” Rex looked over Mitch’s shoulder at the black Saab.

“It’s all right,” Mitch said. “You married?”

“No, you?”

“Divorced. I have a son. Any kids?”

“Not so I’ve heard.”

Mitch smiled, but Rex didn’t return it.

And that was that. There was an instant when they might have shaken hands in parting, but they didn’t.

“Good to see you,” Mitch said awkwardly.

“Yeah. Take care.”

Each man turned and went toward his car without looking back.

Mitch got into his vehicle and sat and watched Rex drive off. If Rex was going to check on Abby, then he didn’t have to. He felt shaken by the encounter. He felt angry, sad, a jumble of emotions he realized he had not anticipated fully, and did not know how to absorb in a way that might make them go away. He just wanted them to go away. For a moment, he again considered just going away, himself.

Not yet. Not until he had done what he needed to do for himself…and Sarah.

It occurred to him that the aftermath of a storm might be a good time to start.

Mitch waited until the sheriff’s car was out of sight. Then he turned the Saab around on the highway, and headed back toward Small Plains to see if the high winds and rain had produced any damage that might be of benefit to him.