Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

I looked up at her. Her image was out of shape, her hair hanging forward, her mismatched clothes the most beautiful I had ever seen on a woman. She wrapped her arms around my head and pressed it against her breast and kissed my hair. “I love you, Aaron Holland Broussard. You’d better believe what I say.”

I don’t know how long I held her. But I know it was a very long time.

Chapter Eighteen

WE HAD LUNCH together, and that afternoon she went to work at the hamburger joint and I went back to the bunkhouse. I took my Smith Corona from under my bunk and set it on a small table by a window that gave good light throughout the day. I pulled a chair to the table and sat down and fed a piece of clean typewriter paper into the carriage and began typing. There is no more grand moment in a writer’s life than typing the first sentence of a new book.

“Whatcha doing?” a voice said behind me.

“Hello, Spud,” I replied, folding my hands in my lap. “What’s happenin’?”

He was wearing pressed slacks and a strap undershirt, a shaving mug in his hand, his hair wet and his body still glowing from a hot shower. “I’m going to a movie in town with Maisie and a couple of others. Wanna come along?”

“I’m picking up Jo Anne after she gets off work,” I said. “What happened to your face?”

“Miz Lowry put me to work trimming back her rosebushes.”

I nodded at the page in my typewriter. “I’d better get on it.”

“See you around,” he said. He whistled a tune down the hallway and into the latrine.

An hour later, I looked out the window and saw Wade Benbow’s unmarked car coming down the road. I rolled my paper out of the typewriter and placed it in a manila folder and set on top of it a rodeo buckle I used as a paperweight. I walked out to greet him, my hands in my back pockets, the sun warm on my skin. I wanted to freeze-frame the day and not let it grow one second older.

He drove onto the grass and got out. “Know a kid goes by the name Moon Child?” he said. “One of those beatniks on the bus?”

* * *

I DIDN’T WANT TO hear his account, in the way you don’t want to know what happened to an impaired person you watched walk through traffic when perhaps you could have pulled him back to the curb. I’m sure Wade Benbow took no pleasure in the words and images he used to describe the events that occurred in the early hours that same day, deep in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and west of Ludlow and the site of the 1914 massacre. And I’m sure, as a liberator of a Nazi extermination camp, he did not enjoy passing on more evidence of his fellow humans’ taste for cruelty. But that’s what he did, then coughed into his hand after he finished.

“Is she going to make it?” I asked.

“I don’t know if she wants to.”

“Somebody found her on the ground? By herself?”

“The guy who called it in wouldn’t give his name. The dispatcher said he sounded like a broken record.”

“But somebody saw the bus leaving the area?” I said.

“It fits the description of the one at the Farm Workers dinner. You saw it at the dinner, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So they must have gone from the dinner back to Ludlow,” he said. “Why would they do that?”

“Have you talked to the others?”

“I’ve got them all in jail, but they’re not saying anything. I have to turn them loose in twenty-four hours. There’s a guy named Jimmy Doyle among them, a real hard case. Ever hear of him?”

“I talked with him at the dinner. He said he was in Korea.”

“What’s your take on him?”

“Bad news.”

“This guy Marvin Fogel, the driver. He seems wired out of his head.”

“They all are,” I said.