“Is there hot water in Many Farms?” a girl asked.
The discussion devolved into bitching and laughter at the bitching, followed by a final song and a closing prayer, which Russ handed off to Carolyn Polley. He blew out the candle, relit the Coleman lanterns, and checked the kerosene heater. There was a rush for the bathroom, which he’d plumbed three years earlier, and squeals of mock horror, the nightly Crossroads silliness, a sophomore boy prancing in his BVDs and singing “Let Me Entertain You,” an ovation for Darcie Mandell when she took off her sweatshirt, a screaming discovery of a rubber scorpion, cries of dismay at a leak in an air mattress, a posse of ticklers bearing down on Kim Perkins, David Goya pissed off at them. Russ tried to have a private word with Gerri Kohl, but she was embarrassed by her vote and didn’t want to talk about it.
He was an old-school camper, eschewing a sleeping bag, preferring blankets. In dim moonlight, after the flashlights had gone out and the room had quieted, and after the comedy of breaking the silence with a loud random remark had been exhausted, he got up in his long johns and went down the hallway to take a late leak. Among his hundred worries was the bathroom water supply. The tank on the hill above the school was filled by a windmill, and he had no way to gauge if it was full enough to last them for a week in which he had to mix concrete and clean equipment. He’d asked the kids to flush only solid waste, but they were kids and forgot.
Leaving the toilet unflushed, he opened the door and was startled by a figure standing outside it. In her own thermal underwear, her hunting jacket. She backed him into the bathroom and put her arms around him. He could feel her shivering, presumably with cold.
“I made it through the first day,” she whispered.
He clasped her delicate head to his chest, and his testosterone manifested itself in his long johns. A possibility he’d been too obtuse to be aware of on his previous Arizona trip, before Sally Perkins had appeared to him in a dream, a possibility inherent in the nighttime mixing of sexes in close quarters, on the margins of civilization, was now being realized.
“I felt so lonely on the bus,” Frances whispered. “I was wishing I hadn’t come.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here. It only makes sense with you.”
In the intimacy of her you, he detected an invitation to kiss her. But she lowered her arms and turned away.
“Just please include me,” she said. “I need to know you’re there.”
The next morning, after a breakfast heavy on grits, he began work on the handicapped ramps. David Goya did the math on the ramp angles while Russ and Craig Dilkes sorted lumber for the pouring forms and the rest of the crew moved earth. In previous years, when Keith Durochie was involved, Russ had sent crews to nearby ranches. This year, with forty kids penned up at the school, where the only other work was building bookcases, he was at once overstaffed and worried that the ramp-building job was too large to finish in five days. Stripped down to a T-shirt, under a warming sun, he worked with the focus of his mother and his grandfather, and the long morning seemed gone in ten minutes. At lunchtime, he asked Daisy Benally again about Clyde’s grievance with Keith, but Daisy again declined to elaborate. He reproached himself for having been too scattered to get the story from Wanda when he had the chance. Now there was nothing to be done but wait for Wanda to come and explain.
In the evening, when the group was eating dinner and he heard a vehicle on the school road, he briefly hoped it might be Wanda, but he didn’t stop to wonder where the vehicle was going. Not until it came roaring back down the hill did he wonder. Stepping outside, he saw Clyde’s truck turning onto the main road.
Only he had seen it. The group’s merriment level was high; a piece of turnip had been flung. He had to pretend to be surprised when, after dinner, he led the group back up the hill and found the school door, which he’d been careful to padlock, standing open. The doorframe was splintered, the hasp dangling from the lock.
David Goya, speaking for everyone, said, “Uh-oh.”
Quietly, as a group, in wandering flashlight beams, they went inside and surveyed the room where they slept. Suitcases and duffel bags had been emptied on the floor, sleeping bags tossed around, a bottle of talcum powder thrown against a wall, but Bobby Jett’s expensive camera was sitting where he’d left it. Frances took Russ by the arm. He could feel her looking up at him, but he didn’t want to look at anyone. The fault was clearly his.
“Where’s my guitar?” Darcie Mandell said.