The Farm

Chapter Sixteen

Arvel remained calm when he found his wife sprawled on the kitchen floor. He'd been a volunteer firefighter for over a decade, ever since a liquored-up cousin had set one of his outbuildings on fire by dropping a cigarette in a crate of greasy auto parts. Arvel didn't know all the fancy techniques used by the Rescue Squad folks, but he'd watched them in action plenty of times. His favorite emergency tech was Henrietta Coggins, who was built like a cross between Arnold Schwartzenegger and Julia Roberts, except unfortu nately Henrietta had Arnie's chin and hairline and the Pretty Woman's nose and muscle tone. Despite this unsettling mix, she was cool as a September salamander when the pressure was on, and it was her voice that Arvel now heard in his head. He repeated the imagined lines to his wife as he knelt beside her and felt for her pulse.

'Hey, honey, looks like you had you a little mishap.' Check pulse, don't know a damned thing about how fast it's supposed to be, maybe it's mine that's thumping like a rat trapped in a bucket, but yours feels mighty shallow. 'But don't you worry none, 'cause old Arvel's right here beside you. We'll get through this and have you baking lemon cakes again in no time.'

When Arvel had heard the noise from the kitchen, his first reac tion had been annoyance, because one of the guys on TV was about to get voted off the show. It was the guy with the bandanna who hadn't shaved; there was one on every reality show. Arvel could al ways tell which asshole was going to get cut loose, though it never happened in the first few episodes. No, they had to string the audi ence along and let all the viewers build up a real hate for the guy, which was made worse by the fact that he just might have a chance of winning. Which would mean another asshole millionaire in the world while folks like Arvel still had to get up at 6:00 a.m. and put in ten hard hours. Well, seven if he could help it. So he'd been working up a decent dose of spite for the asshole in the bandanna when the floor shook and thunder boomed in the kitchen, as if his wife had dropped four sacks of cornmeal. But since she couldn't lift even one sack of corn meal, that meant something else had dropped.

His wife, all 195 pounds of her.

Arvel put a cheek near her lips, making sure she was still breathing. He looked at the back door, where he'd seen the flicker of movement as he'd entered the room. He was almost sure it was some kind of animal, and he had been getting ready for a closer look when he saw Betsy laid out like Sly Stallone in Rocky, only Sly had managed to climb up the ropes and lose on his feet and Betsy appeared down for the count.

She was still drawing air, but her eyes were hollow and sunken. He lifted one eyelid, just the way Henrietta would do. Betsy's pupil was as tight as a BB. Her long skirt bunched around her knees, showing the purple road map of her varicose veins. Arvel felt the back of her head and found a raised place the size of a banty egg.

'You just got a little concussion, is all,' Henrietta would say. She spoke in that slow, reassuring way even when the patients were unconscious. Once Arvel had heard her waltz a car crash victim through death's door with that same kind of talk.

Arvel didn't think he could pretend to be Henrietta anymore, because he wondered what would happen if his wife stopped breathing. 'Don't die on me, now,' he said, a line Henrietta would never use in a hundred years.

He went for the phone and dialed 911 with no problem, then found himself talking to the communications officer in Henrietta's words. 'Is this Francine?'

Of course it was Francine, because Arvel knew all the commu nications folks from the scanner he kept in his truck. When Francine said 'Yes, go ahead' Arvel took a deep breath and said 'Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you could have the squad come down to 12 Hogwood Road in Solom. I've got a patient down.'

'What's the emergency, sir?'

'I'm not no sir. I'm Henrietta. I mean, this is Arvel Ward.' Somewhere in his glove box, he had a sheet with all the emergency response codes, but since his job was putting out fires or occasion ally directing traffic, he'd never bothered to memorize the list. All he knew was that, in car wrecks, 'PI' meant 'personal injury' and 'PD' meant 'property damage,' and you hurried with the red light and siren for the first but not the second. So he said 'We got a PI here, weak pulse, possible head injury. Plus something's burning in the oven.'

'Hold on, Arvel, we'll get somebody right there. Are you with the patient?'

'Not right now. I'm on the phone.'

'I meant, is the patient in the house with you?'

'Yeah. She lives here.'

'Okay, stay on the phone and let me give you some instruc tions.'

'I can't leave her alone, and the cord won't reach. Tell them to hurry, and send Henrietta.'

Arvel hung up. When he got back to the kitchen, he knelt over her again to check her pulse. The hand he placed on the opposite side of her body touched a wet place on the floor. He lifted his hand and saw it was blood leaking from somewhere just above her waist.

Arvel wondered if maybe Betsy had landed on a butcher knife when she fell, because it surely wasn't her head giving off that much blood. He tried to roll her over but she was too heavy. Finally, he lifted her enough to see a rip in her dress and the burgundy maw of a wound in her side, a few inches below her rib cage. It looked like some kind of bite mark, because the edges of the wound were stringy and jagged.

He looked once more at the back door, wondering what kind of beast had wandered in and taken a chunk out of his wife. And won dering why Digger hadn't raised holy hell, and if Henrietta would know how to handle something like this. Because, right now, with Henrietta's voice in his head or not, he couldn't think of a single comforting thing to say.

Jett dropped her book bag on the floor and dove onto her bed. Her heart was racing, as it always did when she was stoned. Pot was a stimulant, and the textbooks classified it somewhere between a narcotic and a hallucinogenic. It didn't make you hallucinate like acid did, but she'd never known acid to trick you into thinking you'd had a battle of wits with a goat. She swore to herself she wouldn't get stoned ever again. At least not until after Mom and Gordon went to sleep.

She was just kicking off her shoes when she heard the pounding on her door. 'Jett?'

Great. It was Gordon. Just the thing to kill a good buzz. 'Yeah?'

The door handle turned. Gordon must have decided to treat her with some respect, though, because he let go of the handle and said, 'Can I come in?'

'Just a sec. Let me get dressed.' She got up, threw a book and some paper on her desk, and slouched into her chair. She hooked headphones around her neck and punched up some Nine Inch Nails, just to piss off Gordon, though she preferred Robyn Hitchcock when she was stoned. No time for the Visine in her desk drawer. She'd just have to bluff it out.

'Come on in, it's unlocked' she said, deciding not to call him on his turning of the knob before she'd invited him in.

Gordon walked in as if he were a professor and Jett's bedroom were the classroom. Lecture time. 'Why aren't you helping your mom with supper?'

'I have homework.' She nodded at the book on her desk.

'Oh.' He looked around, as if he'd never seen the room before. His eyes stopped on the movie poster of a gaunt and pale Brandon Lee from The Crow. 'We haven't had time to get to know each other, Jett. It's important for me that we get along. Important for both of us, I think. It will make things easier on your mother.'

'Mom's been kind of weird lately.'

'She's trying hard to make this work.' Gordon acted like he wanted to sit down, but her bed was the only suitable surface in the room besides the floor, and Jett couldn't picture him sitting on either of those. He fingered the knot of his tie. 'I think we ought to have a father-to-daughter talk.'

She opened her mouth but he held up his hand to cut her off. 'I meant that as a figure of speech. I don't want to replace your real father. But we do live under the same roof and we need to lay out some ground rules.'

'Besides the 'no drugs' thing.'