Kind of Kin (12 page)

“ ‘To them who are the called according to His purpose,” Garcia completed the verse in his Spanish-tinged accent. Brown returned to the cement bunk and sat scraping his boot against the concrete floor. After a moment Garcia said, “If you decide to go, my friend, this would be all right. Don't you think? Much has already been accomplished.”

“Such as what?” Bob Brown asked.

A good question, though not one the pastor could readily answer.

Wednesday | February 20, 2008 | 8:20
A.M.

Sweet's house | Cedar

S
weet slammed in the house, said not one word to the boys eating cold cereal in front of the television. If Terry wanted their son grounded for fist-fighting, he could blame well do it himself. She went straight to her room and took a shower, standing in the cramped stall sobbing while the water pounded down. She didn't care anymore. She did not give a damn! She wrapped up in her robe and sat in the front room watching cartoons with the kids, and she did not call the school to set up a parent-teacher conference, or even to find out how long they were going to be suspended, and she did not call the preacher to tell him Mr. Bledsoe's surgery was scheduled for eight o'clock tomorrow morning so he could get the prayer chain going, and she did not,
especially
did not, try to reach her husband on his cell phone. Instead she fixed the boys peanut butter crackers and instant oatmeal and tried not to think about the empty room down the hall or what she'd said to that reporter.

She told herself she wasn't going to watch, but when noon rolled around, she picked up the remote and switched channels, told her whining son he could like it or lump it, y'all go play in the bedroom; then she sat in her husband's chair, gnawing her cuticles through the newscaster's cheerful promise of freezing rain in the forecast, plus details on the latest Tulsa shooting, and then, boom, there was Arvin Holloway in his felt Stetson hat with his big nose and his drawly voice making it sound like he was the only thing standing between law-abiding Americans and the masses of river-swimming hordes, which was just stupid—how many Mexicans lived in Oklahoma even before that law? Not many. And now there were less. Then the camera's eye swung toward a redheaded woman sneaking past with her jean jacket buttoned crooked. It took Sweet a second to recognize herself. God. She looked like Reba McEntire on a bad hair day. “Miss Brown,” the reporter chirped, “is it true your father intends to serve as a test case for House Bill 1830?” Sweet's face scowled on the screen. That moment had felt like an eternity when it happened, but on the clip it only lasted a second before she turned and walked away. The reporter hurried around in front, thrusting out the microphone. “How does it feel as his daughter to be at the vortex of this contentious issue?” Sweet remembered that part, remembered trying to walk on around her; she didn't remember batting her hand at the microphone like that. The reporter's bubbly voice babbled on: “Some have indicated there may be a personal element at work here for your father. Would you care to comment?”

On the screen the person who was at once herself and not herself stopped. She glared at the reporter. “Hell, yes, it's personal!” she snapped. “My daddy's a born-again Christian, he takes that
personally
! Is that what you mean?” The reporter was young, she was pretty, but she was good. She segued without a blink right to the next question: “So you're saying your father is part of the new evangelical sanctuary movement?” “I'm not saying anything! My daddy's got a conviction in his heart! That is all. End of story.” Sweet started again to walk away. “Your father's arrest is unrelated, then, to a family member being deported?” the young woman called after her. How do they know about that? she remembered thinking. And then: Don't you dare make this seem small! On the screen Sweet whirled, jabbed her finger in the woman's face. “This is about my daddy's faith! Can't you people get that? He's doing what Jesus said to do—unlike some other so-called Christians in this county I could name!” Then, as if things weren't bad enough, the camera showed her backside as she stomped away. Lord, she'd had no idea her jeans were that tight. A quick cut to the beaming reporter: “As you can see, Glenda, this case is provoking high emotions here in southeastern Oklahoma. Live from the Latimer County Courthouse in Wilburton, Logan Morgan, 2News Working for You.”

Later, Sweet would blame it on that bubbly reporter and her questions, plus the phone call afterward, nosy old Claudie Ott wanting to know if Sweet had seen the twelve o'clock news. “My stars,” Claudie said, “we never had even
one
person from this town on the Tulsa news, much less
two
—you and Arvin! I wisht my boy Leon had been here to see it. But they'll run it again at five, don't you reckon?” Sweet stood in the kitchen thinking, yes, more than likely they
would
run it again at five, and then it wouldn't be just a handful of stay-at-home busybodies but the whole blamed town who would see it. Especially after Claudie Ott got done calling. Sweet threw on some sweatpants, told the boys she was going to the store and she'd better not hear one peep about them fighting. If they behaved themselves, she said, she'd bring them a treat. Then she left the house, but she didn't turn west on the highway toward Roy's Cardinal Food Store in Wilburton; she turned east, toward the Poteau Walmart. A thirty-mile drive. She needed to clear her head, she told herself. She needed to shop economically for her family.

What she really needed, what she
wanted,
was to escape. If she could have, she'd have just kept going, on around the Poteau bypass to Fort Smith and hopped on I-40, headed east to Memphis, to Nashville, to . . . she'd never been past Nashville, she didn't even know what was out there, but she wanted to go there, go anywhere, just keep going and not have to think back to the drive home from the hospital last night, how she'd found herself humming a praise-and-worship song behind the wheel—humming! rejoicing!—because the surgeon had told her that Mr. Bledsoe couldn't come home, he would have to go to a rehab facility after the surgery. How she'd picked up the boys from the preacher's sweet-faced wife with barely a thank you and sent them off to bed without mentioning what they'd been through that day—finding the old man splayed and bawling with pain in the hall; that was the preacher's word,
splayed,
she could only imagine what that looked like—just so she could sit in the front room and flick through the channels over and over, waiting for Terry to get home. The terrible gaping black feeling like maybe he wasn't coming home again, ever, and worse: the silent hope that he would stay gone. Because how was she going to tell him? What would she say? She couldn't come up with any non-self-incriminating way to start the conversation, and so the minute she heard his truck out front she had snapped off the TV and rushed to the bedroom, crawled under the covers, pretending to be asleep, pretending all was well, all was normal, no need for him to walk back to the rear bedroom and see the empty bed, the turned-over wheelchair, his stepgrandfather gone.

Deceitful, that's what she was. Deceitful and selfish. Irritable. Angry. A terrible mother. A piss-poor Christian. A lousy wife and daughter, if you came right down to it, and around and around her mind went. She envied Catholics sometimes, she really did. They went to confession, said a few prayers, it was finished; they didn't have to keep lugging their guilt around. Carrying it and worrying it, the dadgum gerbil on the wheel. Sweet drove into the Walmart parking lot with her heart racing, her mind tumbling—in complete contrast to the slow, deliberate way she got out of the car.

She walked the aisles at a terrapin pace, reading labels, comparing prices, not because she wanted to go slow but because the store was vast and she couldn't remember what they needed, couldn't think straight, and then there was the long checkout line, the trek back across the asphalt lot like across a frozen desert, the stop at Braum's for milk and ice cream, another stop in Wister to get gas; it had been like one of those dreams—she couldn't seem to get finished, she couldn't reach her destination. The end part was like a dream, too, a bad one, when she pulled into town and saw, yonder in front of her brick house at the intersection where Main Street crosses the highway, her husband's big Silverado parked in the drive.

He was sitting in the front room in his greasy work clothes. The minute she saw his face, she knew Carl Albert had told—not just that Mr. Bledsoe was hurt and in the hospital, but that it had happened when she'd left him alone the whole day. While they argued—and it was not pretty, all the old stuff dragged up and spread around: What kind of woman
are
you, what kind of mother? Don't be blaming
me,
Tee,
you're
the one gone all the blessed time, you expect me to take care of everything! No, come back here, come
back
here, you listen to me:
I'm
the one who takes care of things,
I'm
the one who puts food on the table! Oh, that is sure right, Mister
I
-Take-Care-of-Things, I don't see
you
wiping that old man's behind every stinking morning! You hush that nasty mouth!—and on and on, around and around, and the whole time Carl Albert hunkered like a whipped dog on the divan in the front room. Sweet was so furious and guilty and defensive she paid him no mind until the phone rang in the kitchen. She and Terry glared at each other a beat, and then he went to answer it. Sweet turned her heated glare on her son.

“I don't suppose you
also
happened to tell your daddy about y'all getting suspended from school?” The faintest headshake no. “Go get your cousin. Y'all are going to face that little bit of music right now!” Carl Albert didn't move. Terry came back and switched on the television. Sweet felt an awful dread pulse through her. But it wasn't her own haggard face talking back to the smiley brunette brandishing her microphone. In the yard of the little rent house stood Misty Dawn with her frowning daughter on her hip. She was plainly, Lord help us, in her chattering mode. “Yeah, it could be that,” Misty said, nodding. “It could be a lot of things. Grandpa seen how they treated my husband, for starters. Juanito wasn't speeding or anything, they popped him for illegal lights, but everybody uses those blue lights. You've seen them, right? They're just, like, a decoration, they sell them at Walmart, how could they be illegal? But then, you know, he don't have a driver's license or anything, so they arrested him. They promised I could see him Friday—I had to bring our marriage license down and everything—but then they put them all on a bus at three o'clock in the morning and shipped them someplace and when I got to the jail, he was already gone!” Tears welled in Misty's lovely eyes. The reporter nodded sympathetically, then crooned, “Your husband hadn't committed a crime, you say, but there are those who would point out that being in this country illegally is breaking the law.” Misty's eyes narrowed; the slow, sullen look slid down. “My husband's been here since he was fourteen. He don't know how they live in Jalisco.” She opened her mouth to say more but the clip cut away to the reporter signing off from a parking lot somewhere, not Misty Dawn's yard. The phone rang again in the kitchen. Sweet glanced at her husband, who acted like he didn't hear it, so she went to answer. Ida Coley wanting to know if that was Sweet's sister Gaylene's oldest girl she'd just seen on the Channel 6 News.

“Yeah,” Sweet answered faintly, and then for some reason corrected her: “Her only girl. And it's Channel 2, Ida, not Channel 6.” She'd already hung up before it occurred to her that Misty Dawn might be on another channel, too. She hurried back to the living room. Terry was on his feet in front of the recliner with the remote in his hand. On the screen Arvin Holloway stood bull-bellied next to the jail with a bunch of microphones before him. The phone rang. She hurried back to the kitchen. This time it was Brother Oren saying he would give the church an update at tonight's prayer meeting, they'd be sure to keep the prayer chain going, was there any word yet about when Mr. Bledsoe's surgery might be? Sweet told him the time, blessed him silently for not mentioning the TV news as she hung up, and immediately the phone rang again. A reporter from the
Tulsa World
wanting to know if he could get a comment for tomorrow's paper. Sweet punched the disconnect button, left the receiver off the hook, stood in the kitchen fuming, listening to the shifting garble of voices in the front room as her husband clicked through the channels.

All at once she realized why her son had been cowering like a whipped pup ever since she got home. She didn't have to walk back through the empty bedrooms or check the bathroom, the bare carport and vacant yard—though she did do these things, twice, before she told Terry—but she knew before she ever took a step out of the kitchen that Dustin was gone again.

“Great,” Terry said when she told him. “That's just great.”

Sweet stared hard at her son. “What did you do?”

“Nothing!” he wailed. “How come you always think I did something? Everybody's always blaming me for everything. I been sitting here the whole time!”

Terry had his keys out. “Do you want to go or should I?” The steadiness in his voice said
truce.
He looked exhausted. Sweet hesitated one long aching moment, turning from her waiting husband to her son huddled on the divan, hurting and frightened. The old familiar tenderness swept her. “It's all right, honey,” she said. “I'm not blaming you.” Her eyes met her husband's. “I guess we should all go.”

S
weet called his name until she was hoarse. Terry walked halfway out to the dump ditch, calling. They honked the truck horn. They searched Daddy's house, the barn, the smokehouse, the storm cellar, while Carl Albert sat in the truck with his head down, whether sulking or crying, Sweet couldn't tell. “He'll turn up,” Terry said finally, coming toward her from the back of the house.

“It's getting dark, Tee. He'll be scared. Let's go around again.”

“I spent forty minutes out here last time, and him hiding from me the whole while.”

“Just once more. I'll check the barn. You go look in the smokehouse.” Sweet started across the barnyard. “What's this?” She pointed to the ground, the faint groove in the soft dirt she hadn't noticed before: a single row of bicycle tire tracks running into the yard from the gravel road, but the track didn't turn and go out again; rather, it vanished halfway across the yard as if the bike had been whisked away in midair. “Whose is that?” Sweet said. “Dusty doesn't have a bike.”