A satellite winked several times without feeling before fleeing the Kansas sky and vanishing eastward across the wide Missouri. Soapy water swirled in the sink between Jinny and the kitchen window. It fogged her comely visage, but detergent bubbles alertly reflected her chocolate brown eyes and danced excitedly before popping on the toned muscles of her slender arms. With a fixed gaze Jinny tracked the African Queen. Shaped like a pea-pod, the fabled steamboat carrying Charlie and Rosie swirled round and round until it was sucked out of sight.
“Farewell, ill-fated friends—you were spared in the movie, but I am too tired to rescue you tonight. Take heart, at least the garbage disposal is still broken,” Jinny chortled. She dried her hands, untied, and then removed the dark green apron covering her short-sleeved cotton shirt and fitted denim jeans. “Mama, I’m done.”
Jinny was anything but done for the night. The window glass squeaked as she rubbed it clean. She chuckled, “I beg your pardon? How rude. PARDON? . . . Oh no! Papa, come quick! I see sparks. It’s a car. No, it’s a truck.”
“No, it’s S-u-p-e-r-m-a-n,” sneered Conor, who straddled a chair by the oaken table.
No again; Jinny had it right. It was a truck that came barreled down the country road—headlights on high beam, the driver screaming, brakes pumping, and sparks flying. No horn. A wheel hub intermittently scored the macadam and screeched like a feline’s claw being dragged across a chalkboard. The doomed pickup careened past the house, veered sharply to the left, clipped the curb, and lunged into a large, frigid, irrigation canal.
Spun free back up the road, the left rear wheel bounded and whirred toward the kitchen window where Jinny stood scowling at her brother. Thirty—twenty-five—twenty—fifteen feet before, as if guided by a hidden force, the wheel swerved right and collided with the face of an unsuspecting sycamore, asleep in the front yard. The leafless tree reeled at the blow; the rimmed orb rebounded a few yards, spun like a dysfunctional yo-yo, and sizzled in the proximate snow that covered the grass.
Jolted from his dream, Caleb grabbed a torch from the drawer, climbed from the Lazy Boy, padded in his heel-less slippers out the front door, and showered the yard with light. He spotted the tired wheel, steaming while being relieved of a fever. “Jinny! Conor! Come quickly.”
Jinny had already bolted to the screen door and been slapped in the face. She paused, waited for her head to clear, and felt for the imprinted, tiny hashtags embossed on her otherwise perfect nose. Her eyes watered, but she followed the sweeping beam of Caleb’s flashlight and rushed toward the canal. Conor, his chair teetering on two legs, hadn’t moved, but words irreverently toppled single file out of his mouth. “Relax, Ma, relax. It’s just Jinny living in the twilight zone. Do-do-do-do. You know the tune, don’t you? It’s from your generation.”
Gemma smacked the table with an open palm, startling, Conor, who sprang to his feet and dumped his school loose-leaf, spread-eagle, on the floor. Rings parted, homework scattered, little Isabelle cried, and Lance slept on. A hollow-sounding mechanical pencil rolled under the stove.
“Okay, okay. I’m going. I’m going. Relax, or you’ll have a stroke.” Conor sidestepped Gemma’s attempt to swat him. “Pa-a-pa, Pa-a-pa,” he cackled, mimicking Jinny. He darted outside and let the screen slam behind him, knowing it would further rankle his mother’s nerves.
Keen-eyed and quick as an osprey, Gemma crouched, gathered up, and scrutinized Conor’s homework, one page at a time. A teacher’s posted plea, inked in red and smeared by a careless hand, was still decipherable. Conor, my friend, you are falling far short of your potential. Remember, you need to pass my class to walk.
Gemma blurted, “Conor, you’re supposed to graduate THIS YEAR!”
Conor had barely escaped Gemma’s blast radius. He ducked toward the road, dragged a finger across a few inches of the gnarly, routed gash, and then followed its distorted arc toward the frothing canal, repeating, “Holy hammer-shark, this could be bad. COMING POP.” The moon was full.
Jinny trembled, squeezed her bare, folded arms, and hovered behind Caleb, who was staring at the floundering pickup. The driver, still alive, couldn’t get out. Apprehending a tragic newspaper headline, Caleb turned. “We’ve gotta move fast. Conor, where have you been? Run back to the house and tell Mama to call an ambulance. Be quick about it! Oh, and better get the sheriff out here, too.” The word sheriff brought a lump to Jinny’s throat—a lump too large to swallow.
Jinny swiped at her brother’s arm and missed. “Conor, is the truck a Ford?”
He stammered, “How would I know, it’s drowning,” and then raced toward the house yelling, “MA! MA! POP SAID TO CALL FOR AN AMBULANCE AND THE COPS. AND KEEP THE KIDS IN THE HOUSE.” He stopped at the head of the driveway and muttered, “Message delivered,” and then ran back to the most excitement he’d had in years.
Upstream of the splash-down and unbeknownst to the O’Dwyers, the water-master’s son—a miserable miscreant named Jody—had cranked open a floodgate at the Haslam dam. But so far, the concrete-lined canal betrayed no signs of what ominously surged toward the wreck. Caleb feared the floundering vehicle could shift, break loose, and float downstream, so he handed Jinny the flashlight, clutched the cement curb with long trembling fingers, and slid gingerly into the frigid glebe.
“OH-kay! I’m here son, hang on, hang on. I’ll get you out.”
Jinny steadied the flashlight as best she could with both hands but couldn’t stop shaking; not because of the ambient temperature, but because she recognized the truck.
“CURLY! . . . PAPA, THAT’S CURLY’S TRUCK.”
Conor gulped. “What did you say?”
“Oh Conor. That is Curly’s truck!” Both frightened teenagers fell to their knees. “Please Lord, please, please, please.” Jinny laced her fingers and rattled out a prayer that Caleb would find a hand-hold and save Curly from being swept away.
“Steady . . . sputter. . . steady the light, Jinny.” Caleb probed with his left foot until his toes found something solid. “I’m on the wheel hub.” He shifted his weight and let go of the curb with his left hand, still clinging with his right. “PRAY,” he gurgled, stretching toward the door handle visible above the water.
No one heard the onrushing surge sloshing over the banks of the canal until a moment before impact. Curly screamed. Caleb yelled, “KIDS GET BACK.”
Jinny dropped the flashlight and jumped back like someone who’d stepped over a log onto a sleeping rattlesnake. Attacking head on, the foam leaped into the air, heaved over the banks of the channel, and bit the road. Bone-chilling water slammed into and cascaded over both cab and Caleb, stripping his right hand from the curb, but not before he head-locked a door-post through the driver-side window with his left arm and braced himself for the collision. His foot slipped off the hub, and his gangly body tailed off, undulating like a steelhead tethered to a fishing line, frantic to be free.
Jinny cried out, “Papa, hang on, hang on. Oh, poor Curly.” The truck groaned, leveraged from the bottom, floated clumsily forward a few feet, and ground to a stop. Struggling against both the current and fear, Caleb seized the handle with his right hand and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t budge.
“Jinny! The light. Shine the light.” She scooped the flashlight from the ground and flicked the switch. Off-on-off-on. OFF!
“Papa, I dropped it.”
Conor wrenched the torch from her hand, shook it, and grunted like a pig in labor. “Now you’ve done it, stupid! Papa can’t see, Curly’s drowning, and it’s all your fault.” No one blamed the moon for bailing out when it was most needed. It had slipped behind a cloud while, like polar opposites, Jinny and Conor stood paralyzed in the middle of the road, straining to make-out the blurred features of their father, who was being pummeled by the angry surf. Consequently, no one saw the black tote—larger than a bag of potatoes, its mouth tied shut with a leather strap—bob and bump against the rear driver’s-side window, guzzle water, then sink to the back seat.
Caleb flutter-kicked, struggled, and regained his footing—this time on the truck’s running board; but not before his slippers floated away like abandoned lifeboats on a stormy sea. He turned his head sideways and, desperate for air, filled his lungs and clung with one arm to the vertical door post, momentarily dislocating his right shoulder. “Arrgh.” Gritting his teeth, he blindly thrust his left arm through the window and grabbed the thrashing driver’s overalls in an attempt to lift Curly’s head so he could cough-sputter-breathe and open the door. It was useless. Resistance. Resistance. Resistance. The door might as well have been welded shut. It refused to yield; so, too, did Curly resist. He thrust his tangled tentacles around Caleb’s neck and yanked his head into the cab.
Lord, please give me strength to save this boy.
Frantically gulping water instead of air, Curly coughed up bubbles, relaxed his death grip, and went limp, allowing Caleb, exhausted and frustrated, to turn his head again to the side, push himself above the pounding surf, breath, and sputter, “Jinny, it’s Charles Corker. I can’t, I can’t . . .”
Jinny looked on, starved for air because she, too, had stopped breathing. “Curly! Why, why? . . . PAPA!”
“H-e-l-p,” Caleb gasped, as the pick-up began to roll over. He slapped his free hand back and forth against the cab roof, desperate to grab onto something, anything that would help leverage him to safety. Then it happened: Unseen in the dark, a warm hand responded, grasped Caleb’s wrist, winched him free of the truck, and swung him to the curb where he hung on for dear life while Curly and his inheritance rolled over, scraped downstream a few feet, and bottomed out.
Sirens whooped. An emergency vehicle splashed across the flooded pavement, slowed, and stopped. Bathed in its headlights, Jinny and Conor spotted Caleb’s hands, rushed to the water’s edge, and anchored him in place. But it took both Sol O’Malley and Raul Costas to pull him from the canal. Time 19:23.
“Soaking wet and shaking uncontrollably, Caleb chattered, “Sol, who gave me the hand up?” Sol looked puzzled.
“Your kids were hanging on when we rolled up, but me and Raul pulled you out of the drink.”
“But who . . .? “
Raul hustled back from the rig with a woolen blanket and slung it around Caleb’s shoulders. “Let’s get you in the cab. I’ve got the heater going.”
Caleb glanced at the moon as it sidestepped from behind the cloud to see what was going on. Caleb muttered, “Thank you. Thank you.” He wasn’t speaking to the moon. He wasn’t speaking to the EMT’s.
“You okay Papa?” He reassured Conor and Jinny with a limp high-five, then accompanied Raul to the LSV, climbed aboard, and stared at his cherished children through the glass. They looked marooned, frozen in time, the water still swirling around their ankles. Caleb listened as Raul radioed the water master and heard him swear, but not before Curly and his inheritance had dragged another ten yards and stalled again for the night.
A grey Karmann Ghia, its lights off, idled on the roadside eighty yards to the east and dripped oil, one drop at a time. The black gold sizzled as it hit the icy ground. The driver, the tail-end of a cigarette smoldering between his chafed lips, strained to see through the dirty windshield. Curly was dead. Ozzie was satisfied. He tossed a third butt out the window, grabbed another cigarette between his fingers, and fidgeted with his lighter. No spark. No flame. Irritated, he tossed the uncooperative lighter into an empty coffee cup on the dash and then clutched and aimed his stainless-steel Kimber .45 at Jinny’s slender silhouette. Ozzie crudely imitated the report of an exploding round, blew imaginary smoke from the barrel, laid the loaded weapon on the blood-stained vinyl beside him, and patted the gun with his fingers.
“Maybe tomorrow, Missy. Nice work, Huey. Two down, and two to go.”
It took Sol and Raul—wearing insulated, shiny black wetsuits with iridescent stripes running down the legs—nearly an hour to retrieve Curly’s body. All six O’Dwyers, intermittently irradiated by red, blue, and white flashers while, huddling in hushed reverence in the middle of the road. Jinny held Isabelle, age four, swaddled in an old beach towel. Gemma handcuffed Lance, age eight. Caleb, his hair disheveled and shoulders sagging, stood by Conor staring blandly at the irradiated canal’s surface. But heads instinctively turned away when the bloating, pale corpse emerged, was bagged, and then loaded into the rig. Sol offered a benediction: “Time of death: 22:00, on a frigid night,” and recorded the time in the log.
Hand over hand, Raul retrieved and coiled his white and yellow nylon rope on the bank. All eyes focused on the long black tote as it broke the water’s surface and was pulled ashore. Jinny covered her mouth with both hands when Sol cut the leather strap. Everyone closed in and watched as he reverently lifted the bag’s dripping contents and laid them on the road.
“Looks like an old J. C. Higgins .22 rifle, a rusting shotgun, two boxes of soggy shells, a repair manual, and . . . a change of clothing. I think that’s it.” He did a quick double-take.
Jinny gasped.
“Oh, and what’s this? Hmm.” With thumb and index finger Raul retrieved a soggy box of Graham Crackers. “Too bad. I know the boy had troubles at home. Sorry folks.” The box collapsed, and the soggy crackers mushed on the road. A tad relieved, Jinny moved only her lips. Curly, where’s the money bag?
Sol O’Malley pulled Caleb aside. “I need a word, and then I’m driving you to your front door. I wish you’d stayed in the cab. You’re in shock. I take it you knew the boy.”
Caleb nodded, “Curly worked for us last summer, and he’s friends with our teenagers.”
“Sorry for your loss, but here’s what I can’t figure out—the driver’s door was spot-welded shut.”
“What?”
“Yes sir, and his right foot was duct-taped to the accelerator shaft. That’s why it took me and Raul so long to free the body. Without dive-lamps its pitch black down there.”
Too drained to say much, Caleb nodded, drew in and exhaled a shallow breath, and groaned. Welded? Chained? Why murder the boy? No more surprises, Lord. Not tonight.
“Thanks, Sol. Thanks Raul . . . Oh, and don’t forget your blanket?”
“Keep it and get in the truck.”
Caleb shuddered. “Mama, they’re making me ride.” Without assistance he climbed into the cab. The rig rolled backward toward the house.
“We’re done here, Caleb. Tommy will be out first thing in the morning to hook the truck, and I’ll update Sheriff Poindexter when he gets back on Friday. Your family should be proud of you.” Emergency lights reflected off the back of Caleb’s head. Red and blue. Red and blue. Blood and water. Blood and water.