Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (14 page)

“You okay, hon?”

“Fine, Mama.” Though a day and another night home, John still hadn’t puzzled out what he was feeling. Connie had shot his blood pressure to the moon twice in as many minutes, then he’d barely seen her for twenty-four hours.

He poked at his breakfast, but he hadn’t slept well last night and his heart just wasn’t in it. Again, by the time he dragged himself up, everyone was gone except his mom.

“You don’t look so fine, Johnny.”

Without even thinking about it, he snagged her around the waist and pulled her against him. She raised the hot fry pan she’d been serving him from so that she didn’t burn him as he sat at the kitchen table. He breathed in the smells of home. A fresh-washed apron, flour, cooking oil, something sweet and something like forever, the smells that were always his mother. He’d been gone half a year and been home just a day and two nights. He’d never get enough of his mother’s smell.

She kissed him atop the head, then shoved back, leaving a pair of fried fresh eggs on top of his toast, so rich and yellow they looked like they’d trapped the sun.

She returned to the stove. Setting the pan aside to cool on the back burner.

“I don’t hear you eating my eggs. That’s not like you, either.”

John sliced his fork down until it clicked against the plate, releasing the yolk and snagging some toast along with it. He ate it, drank some juice, ate another bite, and looked up to see her sitting beside him at the table in the empty kitchen.

“It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

“Her name is Connie.”

“I know her name. And you know that’s not what I’m saying.”

He nodded, he did know. Between him and Larry, his mama had welcomed a long line of girls into her kitchen. Sometimes it felt as if they followed him home like stray kittens. Michelle would just happen to ride the school bus five stops past her own house and just happen to realize it at his farm. Time after time. And she’d need a ride or an escort for the long walk back. Nancy showed up a lot on her bicycle. Later in her dad’s pickup.

And Mama had fed each one, offered them comfort, sometimes advice. But none had stuck. Not Tanya. Not Bernice. And Mama had never said a word about Janine, the brunette who couldn’t put together three words without “like” being at least one of them, or the redhead who’d lasted until she’d found out John had no intention of living anywhere beyond Muskogee or…

“So, what are you saying?” He cut off a bit of sausage, dunked it in the puddle of sorghum syrup he’d pooled in one corner of his plate.

“You’re different about this one. About Connie.”

He looked into her eyes. “As dark as the good earth,” he’d heard Paps say a thousand times of his wife’s eyes, “and twice as deep.”

He set himself to protest. But you couldn’t fake it with Mama. He hadn’t pulled it off when he was eight, eighteen, or now at twenty-eight. Keeping his mouth shut didn’t even work, not when Mama was on the warpath. A quarter Cherokee that showed in her height, her long dark hair, and her spine made of adamantine steel.

“They none of them measured up to you, Mama. That was a problem. I’d bring a girl into this kitchen and she just looked ridiculous.”

“There was Mary.”

“Yeah, she was something. Way smarter than me, though. Had me figured out in five minutes flat. And she was after being a New York dancer, ballet was all she could talk about.” And John could remember what all of those slim muscles had felt like wrapped around him. He could practically lift her in the palm of his hand, so light she’d felt more ethereal than real, and an inner fire of determination hotter than any rocket.

“She made it, too.”

“Did she?”

“San Francisco Ballet, her sister told me just last week.”

“Hot damn, go, Mary.” He raised his orange juice in a toast to the west wall of the kitchen.

“But she wasn’t Connie, was she?”

“You don’t give up, Mama, do you?”

“Never! That’s how I got your father to marry me.”

He reached out and gathered her into his lap. How could he ever be lucky enough to find a woman like this one?

He’d barely spoken with Connie since yesterday morning. At meals she was quiet, never said a word. When he turned his back, she evaporated as if she’d never been there. She took up no space in the house. As he’d headed out to find her yesterday, Jeff had dropped by. Then Harold had showed up and dragged the two of them down to Miss Addie’s Pub for a sausage-and-pepper sandwich, which had led to a beer at Dave’s house and a trip out to watch the season’s last pickup game before the holiday break of the Muskogee High School Roughers tossing the pigskin around.

Then more family had dropped in for dinner and hung out in the living room. Connie had been there and he’d been aware of her. Couldn’t help it. No matter how she faded from everyone else’s view. He could see her do it. Quiet, unassuming, patient, disappearing without ever leaving the room.

And watching, always watching with those amber eyes.

Until the moment he’d really looked away, and she was gone physically as well.

There were things he wanted to know. How it would feel to hold her again. Kiss her again.

And other things.

He squeezed his mama tighter to his side for a moment.

How could that woman not believe in marriage? It was one of those things where the words made sense, about not risking leaving behind a child, but somehow they were wrong anyway.

Connie leaned into the spanner and shifted so she could throw her weight against it. It wasn’t going to budge. She needed—

Grumps stood close behind her and handed her a three-pound sledge.

Exactly! She struck the handle of the two-foot-long wrench once, twice, three times, ringing so loud it hurt her ears in the narrow bay. It might have once been a horse stall but now it held an ancient John Deere Unistyler tractor, one with the majority of its bolts rusted into place.

On the fourth strike, a shower of brown flakes flurried into the air and the bolt let loose all at once with a low, grinding groan and a high squeal of steel.

“Always the last one that’s most stubborn.” Grumps leaned on the half wall and watched her progress.

She used a triple block and tackle she’d rigged from the overhead rafter. The old iron wheel stood four feet tall, a foot wide, and probably weighed more than an entire Black Hawk crew, even one that included Big John. Leaning her weight slowly into the line, she shifted the wheel to lean it against the one she’d knocked free last night.

“Seems that way, sir.”

Grumps nodded slow and easy. His hair was short and gray through and through. The morning sunlight washed over them both through the high windows in the barn, warm enough that she was working up a sweat. She stripped off her jacket and tossed it atop the half wall. The T-shirt and vest was plenty. And she’d never been one to mind a few goose bumps.

“Pop didn’t believe in those newfangled rubber wheels that everyone was selling all of a sudden. Special ordered those old steel butt-grinders instead. Damn machine would just beat your behind to death by the end of a day.”

She pulled out a large pipe wrench and slipped it around the driveshaft. Before she could lean in to test it, the weight of the wrench turned the shaft. Slow, but it turned and the axle, free of the two massive wheels, spun as well.

“Ain’t that a lark?” Grumps nodded at her to keep going. He kicked an old metal and wood-slat milk crate upside down against a wall, sat down on it slowly, and then propped himself there.

She found a pan and set up to drain whatever fluids were hiding in the old crankcase. About what you’d expect, a heavy sludge oil so old and stiff it might have been formed right there, back with the dinosaurs. Then a slurry of water that had found its way in over the years, but the oil had stopped from finding any way out. Could certainly be worse.

“First time I ever drove her, she was brand new. Yep, 1938 was a damn fine year for tractors. Must say the next six or seven years sucked for everything else. I was too young for the war and Pop too old, what with me being a late child, but it was a damn fine year for tractors.” He kicked his feet out on the old straw.

“I was ten when Pop told me it was time to learn to get on in the world and five years was school learning enough for any man. I was never much good at school anyhow. And when he showed me this new tractor, his first new one ever, and told me it was mine to drive, well, I tell ya, I was still in short pants and barely as tall as that wheel there.” He nodded at the pair stacked against the wall.

She tried to picture him. The little tractor didn’t come much higher than her shoulder, but it had a stout, powerful, can-do look about it. It must have looked huge to a young boy.

“I was a goner, I can tell you. It was all bright and shiny and beautiful and strong. Just like the first time I saw my Liza. Just a goner.”

He left a long pause, and Connie glanced over her shoulder to see if he’d gone to sleep. He hadn’t, nor did he look sad. He just stared up for a bit at the dust motes spinning in the sunlight shooting through a high window.

He blinked a couple times and looked at her.

“Last time anyone drove that tractor was my boy, Paul Andrew Percy Wallace, Paps to you young ’uns. I didn’t let him on it till he’d made it through high school. Played football. Pretty good.” Again that drifting silence.

Connie was okay with that. She’d never been comfortable around people who needed to fill each silence with words. Grumps was comfortable to be silent with.

She dragged over an old wooden bench to start laying out the smaller pieces she’d already busted free. Stopped to blow on her fingers a bit. Not a hard cold, not like Nevada. But not exactly the Pakistan desert, either.

“Never was as good as John, though.”

What wasn’t? Who? Oh, Paps at football.

“What position did John play?” She took up the sledge again.

“Star quarterback. Senior year they got one game off the state championship for the first time in over twenty years. Haven’t been so close since, either.”

Connie looked up at the man not all that much smaller than his son or grandson, if you discounted the thinning of old age.

“With his size, I’d have thought he’d be a defensive tackle or something.”

“Too smart. They had to find a use for those brains. And he was always good with his hands.”

Connie nodded, she’d seen as much herself. Could still feel how he’d held her as if she were something precious rather than a woman to be manhandled. He’d shown her both strength and gentleness. Damn, she looked away. No worries about goose bumps now as her skin heated.

She tried to return her attention to the transfer case but with less luck. The way John’s hands had wrapped around her waist, held her tight and close and… safe. Wow! That was a surprising thought. Before John she’d have defined “safe” as not being shot at. She’d have to think about that.

A couple quick raps with the sledge returned a tight ring. The transfer case and axle might be rusted on the outside, as the brown clouds shivering off the steel proved, but the metal was still thick and strong. She whacked it again, then propped the sledge’s head against the steel and her ear against the butt of the handle. She couldn’t hear any loose bits twanging or rattling inside and there hadn’t been any metal shavings in the old oil sludge. Could still be trouble once she got inside, but it didn’t seem likely.

“Like you. You’re good with those fine hands of yours.”

Connie moved the sloshing pan aside to where she wouldn’t kick it into the inch or so of winter-dry straw that scattered over the stall’s dirt floor.

“Been mechanicking a while.” Grumps wasn’t asking a question.

“Dad started me out young.” The first toy she could really remember was a windup alarm clock designed to be taken apart by a kid. Maybe not a four-year-old, but all of the parts were big and well marked. She’d taken it apart and put it back together a thousand times, always impressed by the neatness of the winding mechanism, the prickly edges of the gears against her palm, the interlocking precision.

It had taken her a while to puzzle out how to fix its running slow, but she’d solved that in the end as well, reworking the timing counterweight with a small file. That was all before moving on to bigger projects. Assembling her first bicycle right down to bolting on the training wheels.

“I remember building my first go-cart. Scrap metal from my dad’s collection of junk and a lawn mower engine I rebuilt from the block up. Thought I was seriously hot shit in that.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten, I guess.” She’d really been eight, but people looked at her strangely when she told them she’d been a skilled welder at eight. Hers had been the only go-cart at Fort Bragg to have a full cowling with all of the weld beads ground smooth.

“Did you win?” Of course, the old man would assume she’d raced it.

“Got whupped. Jimmy Jepps’s dad bought him this fancy, duded-up, factory-built cart.”

Grumps leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees, and inspected her with narrowed eyes.

“What did ya do about it?”

“I disappeared into the garage for three months. Designed and built this primitive transmission that gave me a one-time upshift. Once I was up to speed, I’d throw this lever that jacked in a different gear, if I handled the throttle just right, and then I flew. I also painted her lipstick red. Blew the doors off Jimmy Jepps, then I put her away and never raced again.”

Grumps smacked his knee loudly with his open palm. “Good girl! Showed that Jimmy a thing or two, I betcha.”

Connie had. She’d proven she was smarter, more of an outsider, even stranger than Jimmy and all her peers imagined, which was pretty weird by third grade.

She focused hard on getting the axle out of the tractor’s transfer case to bury the memories. The bad times along with the good times, like the cold evenings in the garage with her dad on those rare times when he made it home from tour. She’d always trained her mind to leave the past behind. Live in the present. Definitely not the past, and no real point in betting on an unknown future. There was only the now. That was all that mattered. She kept telling herself that so often that she almost believed it.

But it suddenly seemed important to know what had happened to that old clock. Now her life fit in a duffel bag and a small storage locker at Fort Campbell, one that was mostly empty.

“Been doing it a long while,” she told the axle, grunting a bit as she slipped the inner shaft free and hefted it, hoping she could get it onto the bench for breakdown and cleaning before it slipped free from her oily grasp.

A large hand grabbed one end. John. She’d know that hand anywhere. Between them they levered it onto the makeshift table.

She glanced over at Grumps. He’d fallen asleep in the shaft of sunlight with his feet crossed in the hay and his head resting against the barn wall.

“This was his tractor.”

She nodded.

“Almost bankrupted great-gran’da to buy it. Grumps drove it every day for thirty years to make it up to him. He made the success of this farm with this little machine.”

They bent down together to inspect the driveshaft. She fetched the sledge and a massive pin punch to drive out the main joint, then glanced over at Grumps.

“Don’t worry, he’s pretty deaf. Larry said he sleeps through most anything these days.”

She looked at John. Really looked at him as he watched the old man sleeping. Could see on his face how much he cared for—No. Scratch that. How much he truly loved the old man. Close enough to worship to leave no real difference.

She knew that feeling. Knew it and stayed as far from it as she could. There lived pain. Deep pain.

She aimed the punch and slammed the hammer down. Drove it until the pin flew loose and the driveshaft thudded to the ground.

Grumps stirred but didn’t wake.