The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Thirty-three

It was dark by the time Mitch pulled up in front of the ranch house and parked his car for the last time that day. He pulled out the oversized birdcage he had finally located after driving back into Kansas City, as well as the bags of seed, and the grocery bags of fresh fruit and vegetables to feed J.D. He hadn’t even tried the stores in Small Plains, knowing it was too small a town in which to find a cage this big. “You better appreciate all this, J.D.,” he said as he walked in and turned on the lights. “I’ve driven about two hundred miles today to get it for you.”

The bird let out a gentle squawk of hello.

Mitch returned to his car for more packages, and that was when he spotted something that made him pause in mid-step.

The door to the storm cellar was wide open.

He thought about just walking over and looking in, but the hair standing up on the back of his neck suggested otherwise. Upon leaving the storm cellar yesterday, he had made sure its only door was closed tight. It had still been shut like that when he had driven away from the house this morning. It was a heavy wooden door that he’d had to work hard to open. No stiff breeze had just happened to blow it ajar.

Quietly, hurrying, Mitch walked into the house and straight into his parents’ bedroom. Once there, he opened the drawer in the table between his parents’ single beds, to see if his father still kept a firearm there.

Yes…there it was, small and deadly, and just what he wanted to see.

He remembered this gun, this specific gun. It had a distinctive black handle and silver barrel, and if he recalled correctly, it had been a birthday gift to his father from Quentin Reynolds and Nathan Shellenberger.

God only knew how recently the gun had been oiled, or whether the barrel was clean enough to fire a bullet without backfiring into his own chest. It could be that the gun-which was more like an old-West pistol, a collector’s item, than a modern gun-had not been fired in twenty years, or more. There were bullets in the chamber, he discovered. Even if it couldn’t shoot straight, it still had the potential for scaring the hell out of somebody, even if it couldn’t kill them.

There were certain things a person never forgot about the country, Mitch thought.

One was how to shoot. Another was the stories of strangers who holed up in empty farm and ranch houses, people for whom any port in a storm would do, especially if it was somebody else’s port. By and large, they were people you didn’t want to mess with. They were, occasionally, escaped convicts passing through. It was a wide, empty, lonely countryside. Help could take hours to arrive.

Mitch quietly walked back outdoors, the pistol at his side.

Though he had shut the storm cellar door, he supposed that its broken lock hanging loose was as good as a “vacancy” sign on a motel. He imagined how pleased and surprised a visitor might be to find the cellar all fixed up like a small apartment. If somebody was in there now, however, they had been sloppy to leave the door open.

Or claustrophobic.

Or it might only mean they had been there and were gone.

Mitch fervently prayed for that to be the case.

The grass beneath his shoes was damp, muffling the sound of his approach.

When he reached the doorway, Mitch took a breath, raised the gun with his right hand, and flipped on the light switch with his left.

The light revealed the room as he remembered it, with one exception.

A teenage boy lay asleep in a bedroll on the floor.

“Up!” Mitch commanded.

The boy stirred, then shot up until he was sitting up. He was tall and skinny, dark-haired, with a thin face and a sour expression on it. “Wha’ the fuck!”

“Get up,” Mitch told him. “Slowly.”

The kid looked more angry than scared. He glared at the gun in Mitch’s hand, then up at Mitch’s face. “Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck you doin’ with my father’s gun?”

Even though they were only standing against counters in the kitchen, it felt as if they were warily circling each other, Mitch thought. They were both getting used to the idea that they were brothers.

The kid was almost scarily blunt, it turned out.

“You’re Jeff?” Mitch had asked him in the storm cellar.

“Yeah, who the fuck are you?”

“I guess I’m your brother,” Mitch told him. “I’m Mitch.”

“No shit” was the kid’s response, accompanied by an unreadable look. “Got any beer?”

Now, in the kitchen, each of them with a can in their hands, Jeff Newquist said to Mitch Newquist, “Where the hell you been for seventeen years?”

“College,” Mitch answered, deciding a literal answer was the safest one for the moment, “then Chicago. Denver. I’ve been in Kansas City the rest of the time.”

“So why didn’t you ever come back?”

Mitch detected no pain in the question, or at least he didn’t think he did. He would have sworn that he saw and heard only a kind of hard curiosity. Nevertheless, he deflected it with his own question. “What have they told you about me?”

“Ma and Pa?”

Mitch started. “Ma and Pa?” Incredulously, he said, “You call them Ma and Pa?”

A glimmer of what looked like hateful humor suddenly appeared on the boy’s sharp-featured face. “When I was little, she wanted me to call her Mama.” He put the accent flutingly on the last syllable, making it sound French. “I changed it to Ma just to piss her off.”

“That would do it,” Mitch said, and started to laugh.

The boy looked surprised, and then he looked secretly pleased.

“So what did they say about why I left?” Mitch asked him.

Jeff shrugged. “You got in some trouble. It was best that you leave town.” Again, he spoke in a flutingly false tone, clearly imitating the elevated way their mother and father spoke. “It was best that you not return.”

Mitch snorted. “I got into some trouble?”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “You saying you didn’t?”

“I’m saying it wasn’t my fault.”

That elicited a snort from the boy. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

Mitch felt a warming to this boy.

“Did they tell you what kind of trouble I was supposed to have gotten into?”

“They never did, but everybody else has. Some people thought you might have killed somebody, that girl in the cemetery…”

“Jesus,” Mitch breathed. “People really thought that?”

“Not really. I don’t know. Nobody really knows. You know what they call me?”

Mitch blinked at the sudden change of tack. “Who?”

“People.”

“No. What do they call you?”

“The Substitute Son. How you like that?”

Mitch was appalled for the boy’s sake. “That’s shitty, Jeff. It sucks.”

Again, the boy looked pleased. Again, he seemed not to take very personally any part of what he was saying or hearing.

“What’s it been like for you,” Mitch asked, “growing up with them?”

That produced another shrug. “Livin’ with old folks. They’re old, all their friends are old. It’s like this huge generation gap.”

It was true, Mitch thought. His parents had been in their thirties, as their best friends had been, when they’d raised him. But they’d been in their forties when they’d adopted this boy. That might not have seemed such a large gap, but Nadine and the judge had always seemed older than their age anyway.

“You feel like you were raised by grandparents?” Mitch asked him.

“I guess.” For the first time, the kid seemed to hesitate. “So what was it like for you? Being their kid. Back in the day.”

Mitch didn’t hesitate. “They weren’t much fun,” he said with wry understatement. “But I liked their friends…” He smiled a little. “…who weren’t so old back then. I was close to the Reynoldses and the Shellenbergers…” He paused, to see if the kid would take up that subject in any way.

Jeff didn’t show any interest. Maybe he wasn’t close to those families, Mitch thought, since they didn’t have kids his age.

“Where’d you get the bird?”

“Brought him with me,” Mitch lied.

The boy gave him an amused squinty glance that slightly unnerved Mitch. The look suggested that Jeff knew he was lying, but how could he?

“Looks like Abby Reynolds’s bird to me.”

“Abby’s? She has a…doesn’t she have a smaller bird?”

“Well, yeah, she had two smaller ones and also a big parrot like this one, only it got lost in that storm. She’s got notices up all over town, didn’t you see them?”

“No.” Mitch stared over at J.D., who had cocked his red head and was giving them the eye. His father had claimed that somebody had stolen the bird, but Mitch hadn’t believed it. He thought that one of his parents had left the door open and allowed the bird to fly away because they didn’t want to be bothered. Was it possible that somebody had stolen J.D. and that that somebody was Abby? He looked back at Jeff and said firmly, “This is my bird.”

“Whatever.”

It was strange, but now and then an expression crossed the boy’s face that reminded Mitch of either Nadine or the judge. He knew that people who lived together for a long time could end up looking like each other, but it was still kind of amazing to see the right side of the kid’s mouth quirk down in a disparaging fashion, like the judge’s did, or to see him raise those eyebrows as Nadine used to do when she was confronted by information she could scarcely credit.

“Why’d you come back?” he asked Mitch.

There was a definite challenge in the question. For the first time Mitch thought he heard something personal in it. Maybe it was only his imagination, but he thought he was hearing, beneath the actual words, How come you couldn’t come back to see your brother for seventeen fucking years, but you come back now? Or maybe, Mitch thought wryly, it was more like, Who the hell you think you are to come fuck with my inheritance after all these years?

In that moment, Mitch realized something, and decided to tell the truth about it.

“I don’t think I ever got it,” he said.

“Got what?”

“That I have a brother.”

Something passed through the boy’s eyes, some flicker of surprise and emotion that could have been anything, but that Mitch read as resentment and hurt. He knew he was right when Jeff said, “How the fuck could you not understand you had a brother?” The cold and angry tone reminded Mitch, creepily, of their late mother, though the language did not. Evidently, Jeff had picked up from Nadine and the judge their kind of cold anger, as opposed to the kind of hot anger that Mitch had always considered to be more honest. Whenever he heard that same kind of cold tone coming out of his own mouth, he hated it, even when he couldn’t stop it.

Mitch took a long moment to answer, not wanting to bullshit the kid.

“I was…jealous,” he finally said. “I was young. I’d been kicked out. I’d lost my home, my family, all my friends. I didn’t even get to graduate with my class. I was a mess. I was alone, I felt falsely accused of something, my parents seemed cold as ice. And then they introduced you into the scene. You were total news to me. I didn’t even know they had ever wanted to adopt. I didn’t know they wanted any more kids. I couldn’t have been more shocked if they had told me they had adopted an alien baby. If you were the substitute son, then I guess I felt like the forgotten son.” He stopped, to think it through some more. “I didn’t blame you. I blamed them. They were so fucking cold the way they did everything. I felt like they had decided I was too much trouble to bother with anymore. I felt like they threw me out and cut me off, so I cut them off.”

The kid looked down at the kitchen floor. When he raised his face it was devoid of any expression that might give away any of his feelings. “Got any more beer?”

“No.” He did have more-and if Jeff had seen the inside of the refrigerator he knew it-but Mitch wasn’t going to encourage the seventeen-year-old to drink more. He suspected the kid already did plenty of that. “You want to stay here? You want the other bed?”

The kid shrugged, without saying yes or no.

“What’s with the fancy storm cellar?” Mitch asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“Why is it all fixed up like an apartment?”

Jeff shrugged. “Dunno. First time I ever saw the inside of it.”

“Really? How’d you get here, Jeff? I didn’t see a car.”

“I parked behind the house.”

“Why’d you come out here?”

The boy hesitated, then shrugged again. “I was curious. Dad told me you were here so I came out to see what you look like. But you weren’t here. So I saw the lock on the storm cellar was broken and I went over and that’s when I saw it was, like, furnished. I decided to sack out until you got back.”

“Why’d you leave the door open?”

“Are you kidding me? You think I want to get shut in there?”

“Yeah.” Mitch knew what he meant. The storm cellar raised all kinds of primitive fears in him, too. It was the kind of place that made imaginations run wild…what if a person couldn’t get out, what if nobody ever found them, what if…

“You have school tomorrow?”

Jeff shook his head. “I’m done.”

“Graduated?”

“Next year.”

“You got a job?”

A self-satisfied smirk appeared on the kid’s face. “I did. Until this afternoon.”

“What happened?” Mitch decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and then was surprised by the answer. “You quit?”

“Yeah, told them to shove it.”

“What are you going to do for money? Unless the judge has changed a lot since I was your age, you’re not getting any cash that you can’t earn.”

“I sold something,” Jeff said, looking down and smiling to himself.

“Come on,” Mitch said, when there was no further information coming. “We’ll find you some sheets.”

“No, I’m going back to sleep in that other place.”

“In the cellar? You are? But you could stay here-”

”I like it there,” he claimed.

Mitch let it go. He even felt relieved. This was new to both of them. Maybe they both required some separation. Feeling a wave of guilt, Mitch thought, After all, it’s what we’re both used to. The thought of separation made him think of his own son, and he felt a sudden deep longing to see Jimmy. Having his own child and experiencing powerful love for him had made Mitch even more incredulous that a father could ever abandon his son the way Mitch felt his own father had abandoned him, no matter what the excuse.

He would never do such a thing to Jimmy.

“Take some food with you,” Mitch suggested to his brother.

He left the kitchen to do some things for J.D.-and so the kid wouldn’t feel self-conscious about taking what he wanted.

After Jeff had gone to the storm cellar with a full grocery sack, Mitch returned to the kitchen to see what had appealed to the teenager. A loaf of bread was gone, along with a package of sliced turkey, a bottle of mayo, one of the six-packs of beer…and their father’s black-and-silver pistol.