The Great Jackalope Stampede (24 page)

Mabel rumbled to life, her V-8 growling under the flame-covered hood.

“The one filled with other badge-carrying assholes like yourself.”

Ronnie slammed the door shut in his face, shifted into gear, and rolled away. Her eyes found him in the rearview mirror as she paused before pulling out into the street. He still stood there stiff-legged, watching after her.

“Fuck.” Ronnie said, slamming the heel of her palm on the steering wheel. Every time she tried to untangle herself from the law, the web tightened further. At least he had not threatened to slap her with an assault charge for her rodeo ride on the drunk cowboy last night.

She checked for traffic. Other than an older, red two-door pickup idling curbside with a cowboy smoking a cigarette behind the steering wheel—like every other Jimmy Don and Billy Bob in the region—the road was empty.

She turned, hit the gas, and waved goodbye to the Sheriff. For now.

* * *

“Did you take the test yet?” Natalie asked Claire. She’d just returned from Ruby’s shed where she had been searching for something to secure the hinge on the ladder Gramps had bent when he had fallen. The makeshift fix Claire had made to it had broken during the night when it somehow had fallen over onto the new concrete floor. Claire suspected foul play; Natalie pointed out some dirt tracks that looked very much like a raccoon had come calling. Such was the difference in their perspective on life in Jackrabbit Junction.

“Shhhh,” Claire nudged her head in the direction of the three musketeers sitting in their lawn chairs on the other side of the newly wired restroom wall. They had spent the afternoon drinking cheap beer and talking smack. She could only imagine the gossip her possible pregnancy would fuel.

Natalie pointed a pair of wire cutters at the wall separating them from the boys. “They can’t hear anything above shouting level with all of that hair in their ears and you know it.”

Claire walked away from her, trying to put some distance between herself and the pregnancy mess in general.

Natalie followed. “Well?”

“It’s the same answer I gave you the last three times I came back from the bathroom.”

“Why not? What are you waiting for? You either are or aren’t. Waiting only delays finding out a fact.”

Claire planted her hands on her hips. “Don’t you have some wiring to do in the other room?”

“Fine,” Natalie grabbed her tool belt and slung it around her hips. “You can put me off, but I’m not going to stop bugging you about it.”

“Claire!” Gramps shouted.

“Saved by the crotchety bell.” Natalie shoved Claire toward the entryway. “Take the damned test, chicken shit.”

Claire flipped her off over her shoulder and walked out into the afternoon sunshine. Across the park, the two older ladies in khaki everything sat at the picnic table next to their ultra-beige camper, hovering over what looked like an unrolled poster or map from this distance. Jess’s beanpole was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was probably with everyone else at the dig site. So why had the khaki club-ettes not gone with the rest?

She crossed the raggedy, mostly dead grass to stand in front of Gramps. “What do you want?”

He glanced down at her stomach for a split second. “I think you should sit here by me.” He pointed at the ground next to his feet.

“I think you’ve confused me for your lousy mutt.” Henry, his ever faithful companion, growled up at her from behind wrinkled black lips. “How much beer have you had this afternoon?”

“I know you’re not a damned dog, Claire. I just think you should take a break for a bit.”

Oh, lord. She never should have come clean with him last night after the card game fiasco, but she couldn’t help it. She had felt bad for him after Ruby left, especially when she had seen the flashes of pain on his face as he had tried to stand.

After some badgering, he had let her help him to the couch where he figured he’d be spending the night. She had sat next to him like she had when she was a kid, leaning her head on his shoulder. After several minutes of silence, he let it leak that he was concerned about Ruby’s future. He did not want to leave her in a mess like Joe had. Claire had recognized his need for a partner in commiseration, and the only thing she had going for her was possibly being pregnant and what that might mean in the grand scheme of her screwed up life.

Gramps had promised after their bitchfest not to tell Ruby until Claire gave him the green light. However, if he did not stop babying her as he had been all morning, insisting she stay off the roof and let Natalie do the brunt of the work, telling her to take breaks every hour, Manny and Chester would be planning her baby shower by supper time. Strippers would undoubtedly be included on the guest list, with mud wrestling being one of the games for all to play.

“I’m fine,” she told Gramps.

“What in the hell is going on?” Chester asked, speaking around his cigar. “Yesterday you were barking at the girl for not moving fast enough. Today you’re wiping her brow and asking her if she needs more peeled grapes while you fan her with a palm frond.”

Claire liked the picture Chester painted. Only switch out Gramps for Mac, who had not called her yet today but who was supposed to be back to the R.V. park later tonight.

“She caught you smoking, didn’t she,
viejo
?” Manny elbowed Gramps. “You lost the bet and she’s making you pay in kindness and
amor
?”

“Maybe I’m just taking care of my granddaughter.”

“What about Natalie?” Chester asked.

“What about me?” Natalie joined them, stealing a beer from their cooler and cracking it open.

Chester’s scowl stretched from the beer can up to her face. “Why isn’t Ford telling you to take breaks like he is Claire?”

Claire shot Natalie a warning look. Her cousin knew Claire had spilled the beans to Gramps, but one wrong step in front of these two old badgers and they would lock their jaws on tight. No amount of tugging would free Claire from having to tell them the truth.

Natalie shrugged and took a drink of beer before answering. “Probably because I took my breaks on the way to and from Yuccaville. Claire has been here working straight through, putting up with your sorry asses all afternoon. She deserves a break or ten.”

Chester’s wrinkles around his eyes deepened. His wary expression said he was not buying their song and dance. “Something fishy is going on here. I can smell it.”

“That’s just the fumes coming from your boxer shorts,” Gramps said, making Manny sputter.

“Now sit, Claire.” Gramps pointed at the ground next to where Henry sat, his tongue hanging out even though they were in the shade. “Please.”

Claire gave in, lowering to the ground next to him, leaning back against his good leg.

He patted her head, making Henry whine and squirm. Claire stuck out her tongue at the mutt.

Manny grabbed a beer from the cooler and held it out to her. She waved it away, grabbing the bottle of water Natalie handed her.

One of Manny’s bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows lifted, but he sat back without saying anything.

“How are things in the house?” Natalie asked Gramps. The fact that Ruby was still pissed at him was no secret from Natalie, who had told Claire earlier that she had walked in this morning and found him on the couch where Claire had left him last night.

“I don’t know.” He took the beer Manny had intended for Claire.

“He’s too scared to risk Ruby’s wrath,” Chester explained with a shit-eating grin.

“Damned right I am. She has a wicked swing. I don’t want to end up kissing the hard side of that cast iron skillet she uses to cook my bacon and eggs every morning.”

“Did either of you two wiseasses tell Gramps about last night?” Natalie asked Chester and Manny.

“Tell me what?”

Chester winced. “We were trying to avoid that name for the rest of the year.”

Manny chuckled. “
El stinko
here thinks if he says the word ‘Deborah,’ he’ll turn into a pile of salt this fast.” He snapped his fingers.

“A ‘pillar of salt,’ you Latin loser,” Chester shot back.

“What happened last night?” Claire wondered what she had missed while staying back at Ruby’s and dodging her mother’s barbs.

Chester pulled his cigar from his lips. “Jessica’s daddy showed up at the bar.”

Snorting, Gramps said, “So he likes to drink—so do we.” He reinforced his comment with a gulp of beer.

Sitting forward, Claire picked up a couple of pieces of gravel and tossed them into the drive where they belonged. “I thought Mom told us he was going home after he dropped off her and Jess.”

“He probably changed his mind when he drove past The Shaft.” Gramps seemed to have taken up the role of devil’s advocate for some reason today, the polar opposite from last night.

“The horny toad tried to get into Natalie’s pants,” Chester added.

Gramps ramrodded up, his knee nailing Claire in the back. “I’ll kill that cradle-robbing bastard.”

Jeez! Gramps left rubber on the asphalt from that u-turn. Kneading where his knee had jabbed her, Claire scooted forward.

“I’m no longer cradle-robbing material, Gramps.” Natalie squeezed his shoulder. “But thanks for making me feel younger.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what age you are. He’s old enough to be your …” he paused, doing the math on his fingers.

“Much older brother,” Claire said, wondering if he had forgotten about his and Ruby’s age difference.

“He hit on Ronnie, too,” Natalie added. “More than he hit on me, actually.”

“That’s because she was already drunk,” Chester said, shoving his cigar back in his mouth.

“No, she wasn’t.” Natalie handed Manny her empty beer can. “She was only on her second glass of gin and tonic by then.”

“You mean third,
chiquita
,” Manny said.

“No, second. She dumped one glass over that cowboy’s head for getting too grabby.”

“What cowboy?” Claire and Gramps asked in unison.

When Ronnie had made it home last night, she had been stuck on MUTE, claiming exhaustion, holding up her hand in Claire’s face when pressured for any information on the pocket watch. This morning, she had upped her syllables per sentence to one, claiming a hangover, avoiding Claire’s questions to the point of locking herself in the upstairs bathroom and cranking on the bath faucet. Claire had slammed her fist against the door and left, muttering all of the way to the back of the R.V. park, kicking gravel at grasshoppers along the way.

Something was very wrong with her older sister, and Claire had a feeling the volcano inside of Ronnie had lava bubbling up its throat. She had gone totally off the “weird” scale and was now existing somewhere in the lower realms of “temporary insanity.”

Kate thought Claire was blowing things out of proportion, looking to find problems in everyone’s lives rather than focus on her own, and Kate was probably partially right. This possible pregnancy was fucking with Claire’s head. But she had been watching their oldest sister closely this last week, and every time someone asked Ronnie about her ex-husband or brought up the whole divorce shambles, she found some excuse to leave the room. Now add Ronnie dumping a drink over some stranger’s head, which went completely against all of those etiquette lessons she had been force fed, and Claire was pretty damned certain the volcano was about to go
ka-boom
!

“Kate said he was some drunken cowboy that Ronnie shoved to the floor. Then she rode him like a stallion,” Manny said, his moustache curling with his lips. “
Ay yi yi
, I love a woman who likes to buck.”

“She did what?” A vein in Gramps’s forehead throbbed.

“She didn’t ride him like a stallion,” Natalie clarified. “What Kate really said was that when the cowboy tried to backhand Ronnie, she did some fancy jujitsu-like move and knocked him to the floor, sat on his back, and yanked up on his arm until he bawled like a baby. Arlene’s story matched Kate’s, except she mentioned something about Ronnie asking the crowd for a piggin’ string.”

Hot damn. Claire grinned. Of all of the nights to skip going to The Shaft. She would have loved to see Ronnie take down a frisky drunk. Who knew her sister even had that in her?

Natalie looked down at Claire. “Kate said the move reminded her of something you would have done. Actually, now that I think about it, Ronnie told me it was something you had taught her.”

Oh, really? That was even funnier, as in a load of hogwash funny, because Claire did not remember ever teaching Ronnie such a move.

She tossed another piece of gravel toward the drive. Her older sister was lying for some reason, and one way or another, even if it involved doing some hogtying of her own, she was going to get to the bottom of it.

“So, Jessica’s father tried to pick up both of you girls?” Gramps asked, returning to the point at where the conversation had derailed.

Natalie nodded.

“I guess he’s not nearly as taken with Mother as she is with him,” Claire said to Gramps.

“It appears not.” He shifted in his chair, his face scrunching in pain for a moment or two. “And while that makes me happy for several reasons,” he grimaced, “I don’t think it’s going to go over well with your mom, which is going to make life even more of a pain in the ass for Ruby and me.”

“Your daughter needs to get laid,” Chester said to Gramps.

Natalie and Gramps both groaned.

“Curse your tongue, old man,” Claire said.

“What? You have to admit she could use some mellowing out. I was hoping Jess’s dad would take one for the team and save us all from her sharp teeth. She could spend some time draining good ol’ Steve Horner-toad dry while we figured out how to get rid of her ass again. I don’t think dumping a bucket of water on her will work this time.”

“Are you guys talking about my dad?” Jessica asked, stepping out from the spindly grove of mesquite trees behind them. She had her
Emma
book tucked under her arm, but it looked thicker, the pages more wrinkled. A piece of paper acting as a bookmark fluttered in the breeze along with wisps of her red hair that had escaped her ponytail. Her shorts were rolled up so they were way too short and her mouth glistened with a thick coating of lip gloss.