In fact, Jack was an apparition shimmering in the heat waves like a moving figure in a fun house mirror.
“A fantasy,” Fletch said. “Maybe a fantasy.”
“Fletch, are you all right?”
“I’ve got to hang up, Alston. Hide the phone.”
“Hide the phone?”
Fletch hung up.
And hid the phone.
AS SOON AS JACK loaded his electronic equipment into the back of the station wagon, Carrie appeared with bundles and bundles of milk, cereals, baby food, diapers, soap, cleaning fluids, brushes, mops …
The three of them sat as before in the car.
Almost perfectly silently.
Fletch asked, “Lunch, anyone?”
“Fast food,” Carrie said. “In the car. I’ve got to get back.” Slowly, with jaw jutting, she looked up from Jack’s legs to his waist to his chest to his face. “Before I’m guilty of child abuse, too.”
“If that’s the case,” Jack said, “we have to stop at a drugstore, too.”
“What for?” Carrie still stared at his profile. “You run out of mean pills?”
“Concentrated salt,” Jack said. “To sprinkle on baked ham.”
“What do you want to stop for?” Fletch asked.
“Earplugs.”
Carrie said, “Now there’s a good idea. Get some for us, too.”
“I will.”
As the car rolled forward, Jack slid the tips of the fingers of his right hand down his left forearm. He said, “I’m hardly sweating at all. Must be all that salt I had for breakfast.” Jack looked at Fletch and Carrie. He smiled broadly. “You guys seem to be sweating a whole lot!”
In fact, they were.
13
“S
The sun had lowered considerably, but not the temperature.
Carrie handed Fletch a plastic bowl of chili, a plastic spoon, and a can of soda. She had her own bowl of chili and can of soda.
“Then don’t,” Fletch said. “Let’s not eat their food.”
“I have to. I’m starving,” she said. “Anyway, I brought enough food into this place to get something in return.” She looked like she had been ridden hard and put up wet. She tasted her chili. “Yee! It tastes like chopped horned toads and ketchup! These foreigners don’t even know how to make respectable chili!”
Before sleeping, Fletch had parked the station wagon in the shade of the trees not far from his truck, but facing away from the center of the encampment. He was overlooking three rotting trailers around which there were women and children moving slowly if at all in the heat.
He and Carrie had brought the bags of groceries and cleaning materials down to the trailers. Indeed, close up, the women and children did look malnourished. They were listless. Their clothes and their skin were ingrained with dirt. Both the women and children had enough bruises to satisfy Fletch that at least this part of the encampment was ruled by iron fists and steel-toed boots.
A few of the boy children were dressed in little camouflage suits and combat boots. One six-year-old boy was fully dressed in a uniform similar to that worn by Commandant Wolfe, even to the chicken-footprint insignias.
The girl children and women were dressed in cotton shifts thinned by wear. Many were barefoot.
He thought if he slept lightly in the station wagon he could keep a cat’s eye on Carrie as she tried to organize feeding-cleaning-and-washing brigades at the trailers. Surely a yell from her would awaken him no matter how soundly he slept.
Fletch did not even taste his chili.
“Guess what happened?” Carrie asked.
“Tell me.”
“Three of these jerks came down to the trailers. At first they just stood and stared at me. Pulling from beer cans and whiskey bottles. Eyes bulging, you know? Pants bulging. I’ve seen it before.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“No need to. They came closer. Began making remarks. You know.”
“About you?”
“Sure. They were spread out, one on each side, one in the middle, making a triangle, so I couldn’t have gotten off the porch of the trailer. Fletch, I really believe they would have done it right there, in front of the women and children. You know? Put me in my place.”
“Carrie!”
“Calm down. Guess who showed up and smashed two of their heads together and kicked the third one’s ass so hard I declare he fractured his tailbone.”
“Jack.”
“No. Leary.”
“Uh?”
“Leary. He roared at them, ‘Leave my lady alone! She’s nice to me! She’s my friend!’” Carrie giggled.
Cross-legged, Leary sat near them in the shade. He was scooping chili from a huge plastic bowl with his fingers. Most of it made it into his mouth.
From his sharing the cattle pen on the back of the truck with a bull calf all the way down from the farm, his mouth—lips beaten, missing teeth—should have been too sore to take in food. The areas around his eyes were swollen and purple. The gash on his shoulder had not been cleaned any more than the rest of him. The manure on his overalls and in his hair had dried.
Still shirtless in the split overalls, his skin looked painfully red from sunburn. He was covered with festering tick bites.
“We sure have been nice to him,” Fletch drawled. “We surely have.”
“I guess he thinks so. Nicer than anybody else, I guess. For the rest of the afternoon he has stayed within three or four meters of me. I swanee, I’m safer here than at a Daughters of the American Revolution convention!”
Fletch said, “Glad he appreciates all we’ve done for him.”
“There’s something else I must tell you.”
“Isn’t attempted gang rape enough?”
“I snuck over for a peek at the license plate of that forest-green Saturn.”
Fletch shrugged. “Oh?”
“Fletch, the license plate is from our county.”
Even without having tasted the chili, Fletch felt a very unpleasant sensation in his belly. “Carrie, you and I both know Sheriff Joe Rogers. I’ve been huntin’ and fishin’ with him. He’s been to the farm more often than the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Never by word or deed has he expressed anything racist I’ve noticed.”
“Only an ignoramus would, in front of you.”
Again, Fletch said, “It must be a coincidence. There must be more than one green Saturn in the county.”
Carrie said, “I’m pretty sure it’s Francie’s car.”
Quietly, Fletch said, “I sincerely hope it isn’t.”
Carrie said, “That makes two of us, bubba.”
