The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-seven

By the time he got back to the ranch house, Mitch felt both wired and tired, exhilarated by the storm and by his own anger, and also exhausted by them. He’d been up since before dawn. He’d traveled a long way in both the literal and the figurative senses. He’d had a few surprises, none entirely pleasant, and he had even managed to launch the business end of his plan of attack. Practically the only thing he had not managed to do in the long day was see his father. He hadn’t stopped by the old man’s house, had even driven out of his way to avoid that street. He hadn’t gone to the courthouse to look for his father there, hadn’t even been able to bring himself to look up at the tall, wide windows where the courtroom used to be, and most likely still was.

Now he felt exhausted one minute, and too keyed up the next.

He knew he’d probably feel better if he could go running, but the idea of running over rough, unfamiliar dirt roads in the dark didn’t appeal to him, so he left his running shoes in his suitcase for now.

It seemed incredible to him that among all the things he had managed to do on his first day back, one of them was to avoid getting killed by a tornado. But it had also occurred to him that if it had dropped its deadly tail on the ranch, he’d have had to head for the storm cellar.

He’d better make sure he could actually get the damned thing open.

It was full nighttime when he approached the old storm cellar with a flashlight in his right hand. He suspected that he had picked this time of night on purpose, just to test his courage. Mitch was damned if he was going to allow a stupid hole in the ground to spook him anymore, as if he were still a boy. He might allow himself to feel frightened of a tornado, but not of a hole in the dirt.

The grass that he walked through to reach it, behind the house, was still wet.

His flashlight picked up gleamings in the brush a few yards to either side of him-small creatures, doing their nocturnal things. He stopped for a long moment to listen to one coyote call from the east, and another one reply from the west. There were no bears in Kansas. A few wildcats, yes, but no bears, panthers, crocodiles, or other predators that a grown man had to fear. There were rattlers, but he had found a pair of his father’s old cowboy boots in a closet, and put them on to protect his feet and legs against snake strikes in the uncut grass.

He felt like an idiot to even be considering such things.

When he’d been a boy, he’d never thought about predators, except to hope to get to see them, to have great stories to tell his friends.

At the entrance to the storm cellar, he saw that it was badly overgrown with vines.

Daring himself not to think about spiders, and cursing himself for having turned into a city boy, he ripped the leaves and tough green cords away with his bare hands, after setting his flashlight on the ground.

When he had cleared enough away to see the door, he picked up the light again.

It was a wooden door, dark and splintery now, aged like a cask of wine.

The metal handle looked so rusted he was loath to touch it.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he muttered to himself. “You’d think I’d never rehabbed an old house or apartment building. You’d think I’d never seen a rat, or cleaned up filthy properties.”

But it felt different to be standing alone, with only a flashlight, in the country, in the deep darkness. He was a lone human in a million acres of solitude, the last man on Mars, the first man on the moon, that’s how it felt to him. All around him there was a profound silence such as he hadn’t heard in seventeen years. He glanced overhead to see the stars again, just to remind himself they were still there. The Milky Way had been invisible in Kansas City for decades, since even before he had moved there. But here, it still curved and stretched across an endless sky that wasn’t hidden by city lights.

It was both frightening and deeply satisfying.

He let out a breath that seemed to come up from his soul, a breath he felt he had been holding onto for almost two decades of his life, a breath that gave him a shuddering release so deep it shocked him.

“I missed you,” he murmured to the stars.

And then he laughed out loud, glad there was no one to overhear him.

“Don’t get attached to anything,” he warned himself. “Remember, there’s no decent cup of coffee for a hundred and fifty miles, or a movie any closer than Emporia. There’s no Krispy Kreme. There’s no-”

He finally realized there was a padlock on the handle, a big sucker, so rusted and crusted it was invisible until his flashlight shone full on it. How was he going to get in to save himself from a tornado if there was a padlock on the storm cellar door, and he didn’t have the key?

“Maybe it’s in the house,” he said, out loud. He was beginning to enjoy the luxury of talking to himself out loud, inside or out. Nobody to see him do it. Nobody to hear what he had to say. “Dad probably still has a key, but since I’m not going to ask him for it, that’s not helpful.”

Then he noticed that the plate that held the hasp through which the lock was looped was loose in the wood. It was all so old, so weather-beaten, that the screws that held all the pieces in place had come loose.

Mitch couldn’t get his fingers under the plate to give it a pull.

He flipped his light over and gave the loose screws a few expert knocks with the flashlight handle. It put a few dents in the aluminum, but it did the trick of knocking the plate completely loose.

The padlock held, but now it held on to a hasp that dangled in air.

Mitch pulled at the door handle, and was unsurprised to find it didn’t open easily.

He planted his feet and put his weight and strength into pulling on it.

When the old door finally gave way, it opened so suddenly it knocked him back.

Mitch shone his light through the black opening, but that revealed nothing to him.

He stepped through the doorway, bending over to protect his head from getting bumped on the low doorsill. And then an instinct moved his left hand to brush the wall beside it. Old knowledge had kicked in, causing his fingers to move before his brain knew it was telling them to do it.

He touched cool plastic. His fingers brushed up.

To his utter astonishment, electric lights went on in the storm cellar.

The fact that the wiring still worked-and that it hadn’t been used enough in recent years even to wear out the lightbulbs-didn’t surprise him nearly as much as what he saw in the illumination.

He thought he remembered only a single light fixture hanging from the ceiling. He thought he remembered only cement floor, walls, ceilings, and the plumbing his mother had put in. And he was pretty sure there used to be a few shelves where his mother had stored fruits and vegetables that friends of hers had canned and given to her.

But now…there was a single bed, rumpled with sheets as if somebody had gotten out of it that very morning. There was a table with two chairs. There was even a toilet and a sink. There was a small refrigerator. There was a tall wastebasket with a brown paper sack lining it. There was a chest of drawers. There was a rack with hangers, and there were clothes on them, women’s clothes that didn’t look like anything his mother would have worn: short cotton blouses, T-shirts, and summer shorts.

Mitch stood staring at the furnished storm cellar, trying to make sense of it.

He moved around inside of it, and found there was even more than he had first noticed. There was a pile of what looked like rags near the bed, and when he got to the bed, he saw the sheets were deeply stained with some dark color. It could have been anything-a water stain, anything, but Mitch felt he knew what it was: very old, dried blood.

A noise outside, some animal noise, made him jump nearly out of his skin.

With one last look around, one sweep of the light, he hurried out.

He pushed the storm cellar door closed again, leaving the lock to dangle against the rotten wood, and all he could think as he made his way back up to the house was-what the hell?

Had his claustrophobic mother furnished it like that so she could fool herself into thinking it wasn’t really a storm cellar if they had to use it? Was she scared of getting caught in it, and so she made sure there was even running water? But that didn’t explain the clothes, or the bed that somebody had actually slept in, much less the blood.

Maybe it wasn’t blood, he told himself.

He had no way of really knowing it was blood. Probably he was wrong. Probably it wasn’t.

It had looked like a goddamned apartment.

The idea of somebody, anybody, actually staying in the storm cellar for any longer than it took a tornado to pass over gave him the shuddering creeps.

Having earlier stocked the kitchen with food and drink, Mitch had one beer before he went to bed. As he lay between the clean sheets, he allowed himself to think of Abby for just a moment and to remember how pretty she’d looked that morning on her screened-in porch. Her hair was just as blond and curly as it had ever been, her grin was as open-hearted and infectious as he remembered it, and her voice, calling to Patrick, had sounded just like the girl who used to yell across their lawns at him. Enough, he told himself. He had to tell himself a few more times. The woman is not the girl, he told himself.

Mitch fell asleep and dreamed of dark and secret places where he didn’t want to go. Because of his dreams, he didn’t sleep long. In the middle of the night, Mitch got up and got dressed again.

He walked to his car and went for a drive.