Head and shoulders first, Leary crawled under the gate. He tripped on the truck’s tailgate and landed facedown on the ground. He laughed.
As Jack and Fletch refitted the rear section of the cattle pen, Leary got up.
With a rumbling giggle he bounded over to the only man there who was as big as he was.
Laughing, he smashed his forehead into the forehead of the other man.
He knocked himself unconscious.
The men watched him collapse onto the ground. They looked at him with only a modicum of curiosity.
Leaving Leary as he was, continuing to broil in the sun, they wandered off.
Carrie started the truck. She began backing it between house trailers toward the shade of the woods.
Jack said to Fletch, “What are your plans?”
“I’m not sure,” Fletch said.
“Are you going? Or do you mean to stay?”
Fletch hesitated. “I have some responsibility here. I helped you fools escape.”
Jack squinted at him. His smile was tight. “You mean to stay long enough to see what we’re doing, and why, the purpose of all this, and then turn us in?”
“Something like that,” Fletch said. “It’s been interesting so far.”
Then Jack’s smile was genuine. “You saw that turning us in immediately would serve no purpose?”
“You let me see you had an objective,” Fletch said. “You made me wonder what it was.”
Jack laughed. “You took the bait.”
“Yeah. I took the bait. You meant me to. So I did.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I was hoping you would.”
“Clearly you did. You didn’t come cross-country to my house for my help. You would have been better off without it. You could have been here yesterday.”
“That’s for sure. With easy access to Moreno’s money.”
“You came to my house to involve me.”
“So far, it’s worked out pretty well.” Jack stuck his finger against Fletch’s solar plexus. “Siegfried.”
“Enough of that shit.”
Jack took a wad of bills out of his shorts pocket. “Two thousand dollars. Commandant Wolfe gave it to me. He wants me to rebuild the sound system.”
“What sound system?”
“There will be speeches this evening. Will you drive me into Huntsville to get the equipment I need?”
“Carrie will have to come with us. Or go home.”
“It would be better if she came with us.”
“Why?”
“Your theory. Cops look more closely at two men than they would two men and a woman.”
“I guess so.”
“I’ll go check it out,’ ‘Jack said.” See what we need. I’ll be right back. After I get something to drink. After I get a whole lot to drink.”
“Sure,” Fletch said. “We’ll do lunch.”
“FLETCH, THERE ARE women and children down there. Little children! Babies! In that big, filthy trailer.”
Fletch had wandered down to where Carrie had parked the truck.
Somehow she had gotten a big plastic tub onto the back of the truck, upside right. While the bull calf slobbered up the water, she poured more from a bucket through the rails of the pen.
“The children are filthy, Fletch. Dirty diapers everywhere. The trailer stinks. I think they’re hungry. The women seem half out of it. What are we going to do?”
“We’re going into Huntsville,” Fletch said. “With Jack.
Unless you’d rather take the truck and go home. I rather you would.”
“I can’t leave these children here. There’s a girl down there stuffing uncooked hamburger into a toothless baby’s mouth!”
“Well, you know,” Fletch said. “In this context. Women and children …”
“We’ve got to get them some baby food. Milk. Diapers. Soap. If we get them some soap, is there any way they can wash their clothes?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going with you,” Carrie said. “And I’m coming back.”
“THAT’S ODD.” CARRIE, in the middle front seat of the station wagon, craned to look over Fletch’s shoulder. Fletch driving, they were just entering the long wooded driveway out of the encampment. “A forest-green four-door Saturn with Tennessee license plates.”
“What’s odd about that?” Fletch, too, turned to look but could see nothing but the woods. “You finally found a car with Southern plates?”
“Francie drives a forest-green Saturn.”
“Francie who?”
“Joe Rogers’s wife.”
Jack sat to Carrie’s right.
“Sheriff Joe Rogers?” Fletch asked.
“Yeah,” Carrie said.
Fletch said, “Must be a coincidence.”
“Must be,” Carrie said.
12
H
“I suppose it’s possible. First, please tell me about the ‘seismic disturbance’ in California. I still haven’t heard any news.”
“Cable is one thing, Mister Fletcher; I’ve heard your excuses for not watching GCN, but don’t you even have a radio down on that farm? A wireless? Are you too far from town to pick up the tom-toms?”
“Yes, Andy, we have radios. I just haven’t had the chance all morning to work the pedals to pump one up. They’re antique radios anyway. They only pick up Rudy Vallee and news of World War Two.”
Fletch sat in the station wagon in the sun-drenched parking lot of a shopping mall in Huntsville, Alabama.
The trip there from the encampment had been quiet. Carrie had sat in the front seat between Fletch and Jack.
Fletch had begun, once they had left the dust of the encampment behind them, by asking Jack, “Did you go to school, do all sorts of good things? Sports?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Bloomington. Chicago. Boston.”
“Boston? Why Boston?”
“Why not Boston?”
Over the ignored condition of the babies, children, women Carrie had discovered at the encampment, their hunger, their filth, what she believed she identified as evidences of physical abuse, her fury emanated as palpably from her as would a strong odor. She had difficulty even looking at Jack. Clearly, she had no interest in anything he had to say.
