The Winslow Incident (53 page)

With the back of her hand she
wiped at the sweat dripping into her eyes. Then, between gulps of air, she told
her uncle, “This has gone way too far.”

“Obviously.” Pard steered her
against the swinging doors before moving in front of her to try and block the
spectacle of his niece from view of the rest of the bar. “What’s going on here?”

She could still see Kenny on the
floor, moaning, while blood poured between the fingers he cupped to his face.
“She broke my nose!” he screamed.

Tanner sauntered up and stood next
to their uncle, keeping his mouth shut for once, but his self-satisfied grin
said,
You are dead meat.

Hazel was shaking so bad she had
to grab hold of a batwing door for support. “
Do
something about them,”
she implored Pard. “You created these monsters.”

From what felt like out of
nowhere, Old Pete said, “That leg’s gonna have to come off.”

Hazel followed Pete’s watery, old
man eyes to Tanner’s left leg . . . to the black and the ulcers and the
swelling that were creeping up from his foot and above his sock.
Gangrene
,
she refused to speak the word aloud. But the sound of her bare knees knocking
together was loud and clear.

“Right away.” Old Pete didn’t
bother to sugarcoat it. “It’s got to come off right away.”

Tanner shot a panicked look at
Pard, who was staring at the leg in horror. When Pard met Tanner’s gaze, Hazel
could see that for the first time their uncle wasn’t in charge. That he wasn’t
going to fight Old Pete on this. And she actually felt sorry for Tanner, like
when Blackjack was dragging him around the rodeo field and nobody did a thing
to stop it.

“Fuck that!” Tanner darted between
them, knocking Hazel aside and slipping out of Pard’s grasp as he fled the
Buckhorn.

Pard made a move as if to go after
Tanner but Old Pete stayed him with a hand on his shoulder, saying, “He won’t
get far.”

“This is your doing,” Hazel shouted
at her uncle. “This is
your
doing!”

He didn’t seem to hear her; he
appeared to be in shock. He looked at Old Pete. “You know what this means?”
Pard glanced around at the other men in the bar, clearly avoiding looking
directly at their legs and feet. “All of you—do you know what this
means?”

“Means any of us could come down
with it,” Old Pete replied.

“That’s right. Didn’t I order all
of you to keep off the bread? Back to the ranch! Every last one of you. We’ve
got our own quarantine now.”

Kenny yelled, “I’m not going
anywhere until I settle up with that Winslow witch.” He sounded stuffed up from
the blood congealing inside his nose.

If only she were a witch, Hazel
wished, she’d cast a spell to make him disappear.

“A Holloway cowboy
never
barks at the boss,” Pard shouted. “Got that? Now get your ass up off the floor,
Clark. Boys—get him back to the ranch. Then help him pack up his gear and
clear outta the bunkhouse for good.”

Kenny struggled to his feet, head
bowed in humiliation, trying to avoid the stares of the other ranch hands. Once
up, he pleaded with Pard, “Give me another chance, boss. I don’t have anywhere
else to go. There’s nowhere else I want to go.”

Pard shook his head. “This is not
the first trouble I’ve had with you, Clark. But it’s the last.”

Kenny glared hatefully at Hazel.
This
is not over
, his eyes promised.

“Let’s move it out,” Old Pete
called.

The men rose from their chairs and
off of barstools, grumbling and knocking bottles to the floor like who gives a
shit anymore if things get dirtied up.

“All right all right all right!”
Pard hollered. “Do it orderly.”

Hazel grabbed her uncle by the
arm. “You can’t leave! You and your damage control! It’s thanks to you trying
to control everything that everything has spun completely
out
of control.”

The steadfast resolve that
reliably occupied her uncle’s eyes dissolved into uncertainty. “I’ve done as
much as I can for this town, Hazel. Time now to protect what’s left of my
ranch. You can come with us. That’s the best I can do for you.”

“Even now?” This was unbelievable.
“You saw Tanner’s leg! He can’t be the only one and you know it. And have
you seen Cal lying dead in the dirt?”

But Pard’s eyes had gone impassive
again. A bottle broke against the jukebox and he turned from her to yell at the
cowboy responsible, “I said orderly, dammit!”

She stared at his rigid back for a
moment before deciding,
What’s the use?
and pushed her way out of the
bar and onto the sidewalk.

Unfuckingbelievable.

Tanner was already long gone. Blinking
against the harsh sunlight,
she thought,
It must hurt him to run. Really
hurt him.

Then she stumbled away from the
Buckhorn, across Fortune Way, and stopped to stare into the deserted park,
feeling every bit as empty as it looked.

This was early Wednesday
afternoon. Summertime. The little kids should be playing in Prospect Park,
running and screaming and pestering the ducks while Ben Mathers shouts from his
porch, “Keep it down to a dull roar, will you?” before he slams his screen door
shut.

But there were no children, no
Mathers on his porch, no sign that anything was the way it should be. She
closed her eyes and swayed on her feet, trying to picture the park as it had
been on Saturday, filled with people and rides and music . . . but found it
impossible to imagine.

I want things back the way they
were.
An astonishing admission, she
realized, since she’d hated the way things were before any of this happened.

Opening her eyes just enough to
shuffle into the park, suddenly too tired to properly lift her feet, she
reached the swings and plunked down onto a canvas seat.

The lack of food and sleep, the
relentless heat and shocks, had all taken their own greedy toll on her.
Out
of service
, she thought,
down for repairs.

Holding one chain, head bent
because it felt too heavy to hold up anymore, Hazel stared at her feet. Her tennis
shoes were caked with dirt, the fabric coming apart at one heel, and it looked
like blood had stained the rubber by her left big toe. Melanie’s, maybe. Cal’s
too, she supposed.

A moan issued from deep inside her
chest.

She’d need new shoes after this
was over. Her dad would take her down to the valley as soon as he felt better.
They’d shop, not for long because they both hated it, but he’d be feeling a lot
better and they’d get lunch at Gino’s, which was always a big deal because
there was no pizza place in Winslow.

She began to swing but it proved too
tricky using only one arm so she skidded to a stop. Then she wondered,
Who
else has gangrene?
Stretching away her sling just enough to steal a glance
inside, she was relieved to see that while still colorful, her arm wasn’t black
with gangrene.

Using one foot in the dirt, she
pivoted the swing around like she and Patience always did whenever they tired
of swinging, and remembered her mother pushing her on this very swing the day
before she left for good. Hazel shot an angry glance westward, figuring her
mother must be somewhere that direction, and cried, “How could you even look at
me, knowing what you were about to do?”

All at once Hazel felt as laid
bare as she had that day, when she was waiting for her mother to come home for
lunch, having no appetite for SpaghettiOs in her absence. Then dinner came and
went with still more uneaten SpaghettiOs because that was all her dad could
think to cook for them.

Now Hazel kept turning with her
foot, twisting up the chains. Finally, she pulled both feet off the ground and
the swing spun her in circles until the chains broke free of each other.

Feeling dizzy, she thought,
I’ve
lost my bearings.
Thanks to you, Anabel, I lost them a long time ago.

With some effort, she pulled
herself up from the swing and went to the little red merry-go-round. Climbing
onto the metal platform, Hazel imagined her mother giving her a good spin.
Round and round, faster and faster. Only now her mother’s pushing seemed cruel.
She was only a small girl, why did her mother push so hard? Maybe Anabel hoped
that if she spun fast enough, Hazel would fall off into the dirt and crack her
head open, or be flung through the air and hit a tree. Then Anabel wouldn’t have
to leave Winslow just to get away from her daughter.

Hazel felt the anger that had been
simmering for years bubble to the surface, as if all the terrible things that
were happening now had turned up the heat. “How could you leave me?” Hazel
gripped the metal handle so hard her wrist ached, as if the merry-go-round were
spinning too fast and she had to find a way to hold on. “How could you let me
think it was my fault?”

Her rage finally boiled over. “It’s
your
fault! And it’s
your
fault Sean left me too—
you
made me this way!”

In her despair, Hazel realized
that she should’ve said goodbye to her dad before racing off from the Rhones’
place to look for Sean. Her heart filled with regret. What if she never saw him
again?
I should’ve told him goodbye. My mother should’ve told me goodbye.

Feeling ruined, she pushed off
from the merry-go-round and headed for the duck pond, intending to dip her feet
in the water, rinse the blood from her shoe, maybe dunk her miserable head.

Sunlight glinted off something in
the grass a dozen feet ahead. Hazel approached slowly, the object sparking more
golden light as she neared. She stopped just short of it and gazed down. A
miniature pair of dice, a wishbone, a golden horseshoe.
Oh, no.
Patience’s
charm bracelet.

She visualized Patience’s wrist, bare
and fragile without the bracelet. And imagined that bereft of her lucky charms
she would feel helpless and vulnerable. Then she remembered the brutal red
welts she’d seen all over Patience’s pale skin, remembered how annoyed she’d been
by the sound of her scratching.

Hazel suddenly felt ashamed. “Oh,
Patience,” she whispered, “I am so sorry.”
Why didn’t I see how sick you are?
Why didn’t I care? I should’ve helped you bury the broken mirror in the
moonlight.

She bent to retrieve the jewelry
from the grass, wondering why Patience had come this way after leaving the
cemetery. Staring at the bracelet in her hand, seeing all the charms she had
given to Patience over the years, it suddenly dawned on Hazel:
It wasn’t
Sean you wanted attention from.
She rolled the charms against her palm.
It
was me. All along, it was me.

She shoved the bracelet into her
pocket, hoping she’d have the opportunity to return it.

Hazel slogged over to the duck
pond, where she stepped on the heel of first one then the other tennis shoe,
pulling her feet out. Then she eased the dirty shoes into the water.

There were no living ducks around.
But several dead ones lined the top of the wall at the far side of the pond.
And Julie and Jay Marsh sat on the low wall surrounding the pond, legs in the
water up to their knees. Since neither wore clothes, it struck Hazel that the
pile she’d encountered in the park last night had indeed been theirs.

Jay gave Hazel a smile that seemed
to say,
Well, here we are
, as if things were destined to come to this.
He had some nasty bruises on his face, and his right cheek was sunken and
dented in a way that looked painful. He also had what appeared to be rope burns
on his arms.

Hazel felt no compulsion to ask
how he’d sustained these injuries. Instead, she sat down on the wall a dozen
feet away, plunged her feet into the pond, then put her hands into the water
and rubbed them together in a cleansing motion.

When she leaned back up, she
peered across the park to where her house sat forgotten.

Then she stared at her toes in the
pond, her mind empty now. There was nothing left to think about. And as she
sat, a welcome numbness began to fill the empty spaces, leaving her feeling
nothing at all . . . not panic, nor fear, not the throbbing of her arm or ribs,
not even her tooth. She had nothing left with which to feel.
All used up
,
she thought dully.

She swished her feet around,
sending ripples across the water. It was warmish but still felt good. Shallow,
the pond was no good for swimming, only wading. But the ducks liked it.
Usually. Not today.

Too sunny at the pond, she decided
to head over to the shady oak—the tree she had never climbed again after
it had spit her to the ground. First she plucked her shoes out of the pond and
set them on the wall to dry. Then she pulled her feet from the water and stood.
Her limbs had filled with concrete while she’d briefly rested, so now she moved
stiff-jointed like one of Aaron’s action figures.

When she reached the cover of the
expansive oak she dropped to her knees and swiveled to plop onto the cool
grass.

Glancing up at The Winslow, Hazel
remembered the brown car she’d seen pulling up the driveway while she was up on
the water tower platform, then recalled her grandmother telling her Ben Mathers
had paid her a hostile visit. He was such a blustery old fool that Hazel had
dispelled the notion that he might be a threat to her grandmother.