First Family (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 4)

“Just thinking, Gabriel.”

“You sure think a lot, Mr. Sam.”

“It’s what adults do. So don’t grow up too fast. Being a kid’s a lot more fun.”

“If you say so.”

“How was school?”

“I like science a lot. But I like reading best of all.”

“So maybe you’ll be a science fiction writer. Like Ray Bradbury. Or that Isaac Asimov.”

“Who?”

“Why don’t you get on and help your ma? She’s always got something to do and not enough help to do it.”

“Okay. Hey, thanks for that stamp. Didn’t have that one.”

“I know you didn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t have given it to you, son.”

Gabriel walked off and Quarry put the truck in gear and drove it into the barn. He stepped out and slipped the Patriot in his waistband and took the ladder up to the hay storage area above, his boots slipping against the narrow rungs as he arm-pulled himself along. He popped the hayloft doors and looked out, surveying the remains of Atlee. He came up here several times a day to do this. As though if he didn’t check all the time it might disappear on him.

He leaned against the wood frame, smoked a cigarette, and watched the illegals working in his fields to the west. To the east he could see Gabriel helping his mother Ruth Ann tend the kitchen garden where more and more of their food came from. Rural Alabama was right on the cutting edge of the “greening” of America. Out of necessity.

When people are losing their ass in the land of plenty, they do what they have to do to survive.

Quarry carefully put out his smoke so it wouldn’t ignite the dry hay, skipped down the ladder, grabbed a shovel off the rack, marched to the south for nearly a half mile, and came to a stop. He dug the hole deep, which was hard because the soil was so compacted here. But he was a man accustomed to working with his hands and the shovel bit deeper and deeper with each thrust. He dropped the Patriot into the hole and covered it back up, placing a large stone over the disturbed earth.

It was as though he’d just buried someone, but he didn’t say a prayer. Not over a gun, he wouldn’t. Not over anything, actually. Not anymore.

His mother would not have been pleased. A lifelong Pentecostal, she could speak in tongues without the least provocation. She’d taken him to services every Sunday since his brain had worked out the process of memories. As she lay dying one night in the middle of an Alabama gully-washer she’d spoken in tongues to her Lord. Quarry had only been fourteen at the time and it’d scared the shit out of him. Not the tongues, he was used to that. It was the dying part coupled with the scr

eaming in a language he could never understand. It was like his mother knew she was leaving this life and wanted the Lord to know she was coming, only he might be deaf so she had to really belt it out. He thought Jesus was going to drop into his mother’s bedroom any second just to get the poor woman to shut the hell up.

She hadn’t talked to him in her last hours, though he’d sat right beside her, fat tears running down his thin cheeks, telling her he loved her, waiting with all his heart for her to look at him, say something like, “I love you, Sammy.” Or at least, “Goodbye, boy.” Maybe it was somewhere in the tongues, he couldn’t be sure. He’d never learned that language. And then she’d let out one more scream and just quit breathing and that had been that. Not much fanfare, actually. It had amazed him really, how easy it was to die. How straightforward it was to watch someone die.

He’d waited a bit to make sure she was actually dead and not merely resting in between screams to the Lord, then shut her eyes and folded her arms over her chest like he’d seen them do in the movies.

His daddy hadn’t even been there when she’d passed. Quarry found him later that night drunk in bed with the wife of one of his farm workers who was laid up in the hospital after having a reaper tear up his leg. He’d carried him out of the woman’s house over his shoulder and drove him to Atlee. Even though Quarry was only fourteen he was already two inches north of six feet and farmer strong. And he’d been driving since he was thirteen, at least on the back roads of early 1960s rural Alabama.

He’d pulled the old car into the barn, cut the engine, and grabbed a shovel. He’d dug a grave for his father close to where he’d buried the Patriot. He’d walked back to the barn. On the way he’d contemplated how best to kill his old man. He had access to all the guns at Atlee, and there were a lot of them, and he could fire every single one of them with skill. But he figured a blow to the head would be far quieter than a gunshot. He certainly wanted to murder the old adulterer, but he was smart enough not to want to trade his life for the privilege either.

He’d dragged his father out of the car and laid him facedown on the barn’s straw-covered floor. His plan was to deliver the killing blow to the base of the neck, like you would an animal you were planning to do in. As he was readying the sledgehammer to strike his father had abruptly sat up.

“What the hell’s going on, Junior?” he’d slurred, staring at his son through the blur of drunken eye slits.

“Nothing much,” Quarry had said back, his courage fading. He might’ve been as tall as a full-grown man, but he was still only a boy. One look from his daddy was all it took to remind him of that.

“I’m hungry as all get out,” said his father.

Quarry had put down his murder weapon and helped his old man up, supporting him as they made their way to the house. He fed his father and then half carried him upstairs. He kept the light off in the bedroom, undressed the man, and laid him in bed.

When the man woke up the next morning next to his cold, dead wife, Quarry could hear the screams all the way to the milking barn where he sat pulling cow teats for all he was worth. He had laughed so hard, he’d cried.

Quarry walked back to Atlee after burying the gun. It was a fine evening, the sun ending its stay in the sky with a glorious burn right down into the foothills of the Sand Mountain plateau on the southern big toe of the Appalachians. Alabama, he thought, was just about the prettiest place on earth, and Atlee was the finest part of it.

He went to his study and lit a fire though the day had been hot and the night was muggy with the predator mosquitoes already on the prowl for blood.