First Family (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 4)

Ruth Ann smiled appreciatively. She was rail thin and always would be due to an intestinal disorder that she didn’t have the money to treat properly and in about ten years would probably kill her. “Don’t get that from me,” she said. “Cooking and cleaning, that’s all what’s in my head.”

“You do that real good.” This came from Daryl, who sat opposite Gabriel and had been busily shoving cornbread into his mouth before taking a huge gulp of lukewarm well water to wash it down.

“Where’s Carlos?” asked Gabriel. “He didn’t go off too, like Kurt, did he?”

Daryl shot his father an anxious look, but Quarry calmly finished sopping up some tomato gravy with his cornbread before answering. “He’s just doing some things for me out of town. Be back soon.”

After dinner, Quarry ventured to the attic where he sat amid the cobwebbed detritus of his family’s history, mostly in the form of furniture, clothing, books, and papers. He was not up here for nostalgic purposes, however. He spread the plans out over an old side table that had belonged to his maternal great-grandmother, who’d ended up killing her husband via shotgun blast over—at least the family legend held—a lady with a pretty face, nice manners, and very dark skin.

Quarry studied the road, the building, access points, and potential problem areas detailed on the plans. Then his attention turned to a set of drawings he’d prepared of a more mechanical nature. He had earned a scholarship to college in mechanical engineering, but the war in Vietnam sent those plans awry when his father demanded he enlist to help fight the communist plague. When he’d gotten back home years later his father was dead, Atlee was his, and attending college just wasn’t in the cards.

Yet Quarry could fix anything that had either a motor or moving parts. The guts of any machine, no matter how complicated, easily revealed themselves to his mind in startling simplicity. It had paid dividends at Atlee, for while other farmers had to send out for costly help when equipment broke down, Quarry just fixed it himself, mostly lying on his back, a big wrench in his muscled grip.

Thus he pored over the plans and drawings with an expert’s eye, seeing where improvements could be made and disaster avoided. Afterward he ventured downstairs and found Daryl cleaning rifles in the small gunroom off the kitchen.

“Ain’t no smell better than gun grease,” Daryl said, looking up at his father as he walked in the room.

“So you say.”

Daryl’s sudden smile faded, perhaps because of the memory of a Patriot pistol being leveled against the base of his skull by the man now standing a few feet from him in a room filled with weapons of singular destruction.

Quarry closed and locked the door and then sat down next to his son and unrolled the set of plans on the floor.

“I’ve already gone over this with Carlos, but I want you to understand it too, just in case.”

“I know,” his son said, as he wiped down the barrel of his favorite deer rifle.

Quarry rattled the papers at him. “Now this is important, Daryl, no room for screwing up. Pay attention.”

After thirty minutes of back-and-forth, a satisfied Quarry rose and folded up the plans. As he patted them back into a long tube he kept them in he said, “Almost crashed the damn plane I was so broke up about Kurt.”

“I know,” Daryl replied, a tinge of fear in his voice, for he knew his father was an unpredictable man.

“Would’ve probably cried if it’d been you. Just wanted you to know that.”

“You a good man, Daddy.”

“No, I don’t think I am,” said Quarry as he left the room.

He went up to Gabriel’s room and called through the door, “You wa

nt to go along with me to see Tippi? I got to stop on the way to visit Fred.”

“Yes sir, I will.” Gabriel put down his book, slipped on his tennis shoes, and spun his baseball cap backward on his head.

A bit later Quarry and Gabriel edged up in front of the Airstream in Quarry’s old Dodge. On the seat between them was a box with a few bottles of Jim Beam and three cartons of unfiltered Camels. After setting the box on the wooden steps going up to the Airstream, Quarry and Gabriel lifted from the bed of the truck two crates containing some kitchen-preserved vegetables, ten ears of plump corn, and twenty apples.

Quarry rapped on the door of the old, dented trailer while the cat-quick Gabriel chased a lizard through the dust until it disappeared underneath the Airstream. The old, wrinkled man opened the door and helped Quarry and Gabriel carry in the provisions.

“Thank you,” said the man in his native tongue as he eyed the crates.

“Got more than we need, Fred.”

When the Indian had come here, he’d never told Quarry his name, he’d just shown up. After a couple of awkward months Quarry had started calling him Fred and the fellow had never objected. He didn’t know what his Indian friends called him, but that was their business, Quarry felt.

The two other Indians were inside. One was asleep on a raggedy couch that had no legs and no springs, allowing the man to sink nearly to the floor. His loud snores indicated this did not bother him in the least. The other man was watching a comedy show on an old fifteen-inch television Quarry had given Fred a few years ago.

They cracked open the Beam, smoked, and talked while Gabriel played with an old mutt that had adopted Fred and his Airstream and sipped on a bottle of Coke Fred had given him.