60
Tony couldn’t take her eyes off the police scanner on the dash of the deputy’s car. The woman said she was off duty, so the scanner was not turned on, but all Tony could think was, I wonder if we’ve made it yet? I wonder if we’re on that scanner?
They were a few miles west of Farstone, the land before and beside them various shades of gold and bronze, rising slightly in the distance but revealing what Tony guessed were miles and miles of rangeland. She wondered what people here would feel like, diving in Virginia. Would all those trees make them go nuts because they couldn’t see past the next curve?
Tony was in the front seat. The teacher and Mistie were in the back. The teacher was smiling her teacher smile and looking like it hurt worse than her shot leg.
“You got any doughnuts or doughnut sticks?” asked Tony.
The deputy laughed. “Officers are supposed to be crazy for doughnuts, right?”
“Yeah. Got any?”
“Are you all hungry? When did you last have something to eat?”
Tony thought about the red cherry tomatoes she’d swiped from the fortune teller’s back yard garden, and the cucumbers and peppers. She and Mistie had had a little lunch while counting to ten minutes while the teacher was offering herself up for a ride. Well, Mistie only ate the tomatoes, but Tony had found the cukes and the peppers to be okay once she spit on them and wiped off the dust.
“We’re hungry,” said Tony. “Ain’t we, sis?” She nudged Mistie over the seat.
Mistie hadn’t said a word since getting into the cruiser. She’d just stared at the officer as if she’d never seen such a thing in her life.
“There’s a really super diner next to the gas station in Anson,” said the officer. “You all can get a tank full for your car then a tank full for your bellies. Best ribs this side of Fort Worth.”
Have we made the news yet?
“Can we listen to that?” Tony pointed to the scanner.
“Honey, I’m off duty, not back on for another two hours. I like a little peace and quiet.”
“Please? I never got to hear one before. Just a few minutes?” Tony sensed the teacher in the back, going totally still. This freaked her out.
“Well?”
“Oh, all right. But I’m turning it down. It can cut through my head like a laser sometimes, all that static.”
She flipped a dial, adjusted the volume, then put both hands back on the steering wheel. Tony turned her ear to the scanner and concentrated.
There was a fluttering, a hum, and a male voice saying something about some cows that got out of the fence on the Mendez farm and had caused a motorcycle wreck out on Route 600. Then a code number Tony didn’t quite catch, and some garbled follow up information, “Domestic dispute. Neighbor on Green Avenue heard arguing. Responding to….” More static. How in the world were deputies supposed to keep up with stuff they couldn’t hear?
“Had enough?” asked the deputy.
“Another minute, please.”
“One more. We’ll be in Anson in three.”
“Thank you.” Tony smiled. Playing the sweet daughter was a hoot. Knowing she was almost at Burton’s ranch was so painfully wonderful she could hardly keep in down in her stomach.
Then on the scanner, static, jumbled words, but some quite distinct. “…interstate kidnapping… report came in from Nacogdoches…one Katherine - Kate - McDolen, age 42. One Angela Petinske, age 15….”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck! Tony didn’t know whether to grapple the knob and shut the scanner down or let it run, let the words come, hear it on the air where it made it all real, made it all so goddamned valid….
The officer frowned, adjusted the knob. “What is this?”
“….moving across Texas, likely to Lamesa where Petinske’s father is said to reside…seven-year-old Mistie Dawn Henderson, allegedly abducted by McDolen on Tuesday…. Petinske thought to have….in a robbery and murder at an Exxon station in….”
The deputy turned off the scanner. Her brows were down, making a stern and uneasy parallel with the brim of her hat. “Where’d you guys say you were from?”
“North Carolina,” said the teacher.
Tony said nothing.
“What’s your names, anyway? You never did say.”
“Jackie,” said Tony.
“Mistie?” said the deputy.
“What?” asked Mistie in the back. And she began to whimper. “Daddy said Valerie had a bad liver. He said her head didn’t get cut off.”
“Mistie Henderson?” said the deputy. The voice, thick with a mixture of excitement, terror, determination. “Do you live in Virginia?”
“MeadowView Trailer Park.”
“Uh-huh. Well.”
Tony saw the deputy look down at the empty gun holster on her side. The gun was probably in the glove box. Tony could get it out real quickly, if it wasn’t locked.
“Well, one mile to Anson. See it up there?”
“Yeah,” said Tony. “But you ain’t gonna see in no more!” She pulled the knife from its place in her sock, and rammed it into the deputy’s ribs. The woman’s eyes went huge. Both hands came off the steering wheel; one clutching for the leaking red hole in her shirt and the other grasping for the mic on the scanner. Tony grabbed the mic and ripped it from its cord.
“Ahhhhhh!” hissed the deputy.
“Tony, no!” cried the teacher.
Tony dropped the mic on the floor and stomped it as she would stomp a bug, or a girl in the Hot Heads’ tobacco barn.
The car spun to the left sharply, hopped up over a lip of rock, and completed its spin in the sandy soil of west Texas. It struck a small boulder and stopped. The engine thundered as if knocked between gears. The deputy panted madly, spittle flying from her mouth. “You…oh, God, help me.” She lifted her blood stained hand to Tony. Tony smacked it away.
“Please, get help, don’t leave me here,” said the deputy. The words were muffled, garbled, like the speaker on the scanner.
“Shut up!” Tony jumped from the car and opened the back door. Mistie stumbled out, ran several steps, and dropped to the sand, crying, “Mama!”
The teacher didn’t move. She stared at the deputy’s bleeding, groping hands as they fumbled on the dash, on the seat, then the floor, trying to get to the mic to put it back in the socket.
“Out!” yelled Tony. “Fucker, out!” She leaned in and took the teachers hair and gave it a powerful yank. The teacher crawled out of the back seat. She stood, dumbfounded, by the cruiser.
“There!” said Tony. “There’s a ranch, come on! We can hide!”
“You stabbed her,” said the teacher.
“She was going to kill us!”
“You don’t know that!”
Tony lashed her foot out and caught the teacher in the shin. The woman screamed.
It was her bad leg.
“Come on!”
With the teacher hobbling and the kid crying, the three scuttled up the knoll in the direction of the buildings of the distant ranch.
61
“It’s a mirage,” the girl said to Mistie. “Looks like it’s right there but it’s either really far away or not there at all. I learned that in sixth grade. Believe that? Learned something from a stinking teacher.”
Mistie looked where the girl was pointing. It was a farm on a hill. They’d been trying to run to the farm but it was like the farm knew they were coming and kept backing up. The girl had said, “Almost there,” a couple times but they still weren’t.
The teacher was crying. She was right behind Mistie and the girl but she didn’t talk at all. She just cried.
The ground was rocky and dry. There was some grass growing there, but it was yellow like the hair on Valerie’s head. Mistie tried to grab for some but the girl made her run too fast.
At last they reached a dirt road that wound across the dry land toward a large log house, but the girl urged them over the road, down a short slope, then back up to a rail fence. On the other side of the fence were lots of barns and trucks and trailers. Not trailers like at MeadowView but trailers like Mistie had seen taking cows down Route 58 through Pippins. There were some men in cowboy hats standing in the shade of a barn door.
“Quick, over, and in the back of the truck,” whispered the girl. “Keep low, crawl if you have to!”
Mistie climbed through the fence, the girl and teacher climbed over. Mistie could hardly breath for running so much. They had to run at school and she hated it. Running made her pee her pants. She thought she’d peed her pants a few minutes ago, but maybe it was just sweat.
The closest vehicle was a truck with a long, empty trailer behind. The trailer was made of pipes like the gates of cotton farms back in Virginia. The three sneaked over to the side of the truck and the girl slid open the side door. Mistie knew the cowboys couldn’t see them – they were on the other side of the truck by one of the barns – but she wondered if they could hear her breathing.
The girl climbed in first, then put out her hand to pull in Mistie and the teacher. It took the teacher three times hopping to get up inside.
The trailer was filled with straw, but it smelled like cow poo. The girl lay down flat and covered herself with the straw, then hissed, “Hide!”
Mistie and the teacher lay down. Mistie pulled poo-smelling straw over her head and her body, and wondered what would happen if the cowboys put cows in with them?