Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

plumes and feeding you peeled grapes.

If he’d known how, Ran would have plunged a karate knife-hand into his chest, grabbed the speaker by his ugly throat, and throttled him, or it. He lacked those skills, however, and it occurred to Ransom as a glancing thought that, whatever colorful and gruesome side effects he’d experienced when he’d gone off the reservation in the past, he’d never heard a voice—not one like this. So what was that about?

The exigencies of parenthood allowed no leisure to contemplate the fine points of his medical and spiritual condition.

“Can we at least listen to another song?” said Hope.

“What’s wrong with this one?” On the deck, Robert Johnson was wailing “Hell Hound on My Trail.” “I thought you liked my music.”

“Not twenty times,” Hope said. “Not twenty times, I don’t.”

“It’s helping me,” said Ran with a quaver, feeling assailed from every side, within as well as without. Then he lost it. “Is that okay? I know I’m the grown-up here, and I’m supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, but is it okay for me, for once, to need and maybe even get a little goddamn help?” This rose to a crescendo, and the last two words escaped him at a roar that shook the Odyssey like a tornado rattling a Kansas cellar door.

His Master’s Voice, the nemesis piped up, and Ransom didn’t need to ask it what it meant.

Hope’s blue eyes were filled with the same doubt Mel, once upon a time, had put in his, the doubt that Ran, coming here, had made it his business to remove. Worse, he knew from personal experience that the shout had made her doubt not him, the shouter, but herself. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked in a much younger voice. “Did we do something wrong?”

“No, it’s me,” he answered in a husky whisper. “It’s me, not you, okay?”

At his confession, they both went to pieces, and Ransom, overwhelmed with guilt, felt his eyes brim and dropped his head against the wheel.

“I firsty, Doddy!”

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

“You there, mister…” The basket lady snapped her fingers at the car, and Ransom frowned and turned, prepared to take her on.

“There’s water in this cooler.” She jerked her chin toward the Igloo Playmate at her knee.

Expecting conflict, Ransom blinked and made no move.

“Get out of that car,” she said, “and get some water for that child.”

Resentful of her tone, but inwardly relieved to follow orders, Ran got out and fetched a pony from the ice. “Thanks. How much?”

She pressed her lips and shook her head, refusing to look at him.

“Let me buy a basket then. How much is this?” He picked one up.

“Twenty dollars.”

“The tag says twenty-two.”

“I reckon I can charge you twenty if I want to, can’t I?”

Cheered by her irascibility, Ran took out his pocket roll and peeled a bill. “Here you go, Alberta.” He read the name from a cloth tag sewn cunningly into the reeds.

She tucked it in her apron pocket, then visored her eyes and squinted up at him. “You in trouble, ain’t you?”

“A small spot.”

“You look like you in a whole heap.”

“You’re an astute woman,” he said unresentfully.

“Whatever it is, it ain’t worth that,” she said. “It ain’t worth yelling at your children. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said after a beat, “yes, actually I do.”

“Sometime you got to step away,” she said. “Every parent ever lived had to do that some. Me, seem like I had to once or twice a day myself. Ain’t no shame to it.”

A crack occurred to him—“Thanks for the lecture”—but he found the lecture steadying and held it back.

“Do you mind if I let them stretch their legs?” he asked instead.

“I don’t own the street,” Alberta said. “Much time as I spend out here, I ought to. They ought to named it after me at least, but they ain’t done it yet. That sign still says Meeting, don’t it?”

Ransom smiled and nodded.

“Not Alberta Johns?”

“Not Alberta Johns.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Ransom.”

“Ransom what?”

“Ransom Hill.”

“Ransom, let your children get a drink.”

He prompted the side door.

“What’s your name, Miss Blue Eyes?” Alberta asked, giving her a bottle.

Hope looked at him, and Ransom nodded.

“Hope,” she said.

“Know what this is?” Alberta nodded to the basket in her lap, a round shallow one three-quarters done, with the unwoven fibers radiating out like variegated spokes around a wheel. “What the old folks call a fanner. Used to winnow rice.”

“What’s ‘winnow’?”

“That means dividing the good part, what you eat, off from the chaff you give the hogs. I don’t reckon you ever fed no hogs, have you? Probably never even saw one.”

“On TV.”

“On TV. Come over here and let me show you how to weave. Want to try?”

“I’d like to,” Hope said, “but I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.”

“It’s okay, Hope,” said Ran.

“And you there, little man,” Alberta said. “What’s your name?”

“Cholly?”

“Can you count, Charlie?”

“One, two, free!” he said, breaking out in his sweet grin.

“You see them baskets? Run down there to the end and put ’em in a stack for me. I got to leave here soon. Big on the bottom, little ones on top.”

“Okay.”

“Okay’s okay,” Alberta said, “but can you say ‘Yes, ma’am’?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Charlie ran off happily engaged, and Ransom thought once more about the universal primer course on parenting—Alberta Johns had clearly taken an advanced degree. Despite his problem with authority, he was grateful to surrender team command, grateful to step back into the ranks and be a PFC. Staring south down the block, his eye lit on a big Georgian double house across the street, and Ransom, granted the opportunity to breathe and gladly taking it, contemplated his next move….

Having failed—despite a second, more exhaustive daylight search—to find the Purdey, he’d driven straight downtown intending to come clean with Sergeant Thomason. As he passed the station with the children, though, a young cop on the steps had shot a dark, suspicious glance his way, and Ransom suddenly worried that, without the gun in hand, a confession might raise more questions than it answered