The Franchise (50 page)

Billy Joe Hardesty reached out and took Suzy and Cyrus into his arms. “You shall never be abandoned or alone if you believe in the power of the Lord and let Jesus come into your life and heart.” He cupped Suzy’s full, soft breast in one hand and rubbed his thumb across the erect nipple. It was the one over the heart. “Give of thyself unto the Lord and his servants. This is a Bible-preaching, God-fearing ministry—that knows His power and His miracles.”

“Praise the Lord!” Suzy was enthusiastic and acutely aware of Billy Joe’s thumb and fingers.

Cyrus was thinking about his golf cart. He could not recall if he had purchased and shipped one out to the Hot Springs Ranch or just thought he did. He trembled again.

“Praise the Lord,” Billy Joe bellowed, rolling the hard nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

“Praise the Lord,” Cyrus repeated, with less enthusiasm and considerable confusion. The saliva began to trickle from the left side of his mouth.

“Praise the Lord.”

And pass the telecommunications.

T
HEY SAT ON THE
warm granite boulder and watched Randall splashing in the center of the creek upstream from Panther Hole. The thin sun-burnished boy wore red canvas sneakers and red swimming trunks. He faced the current, kneeling in the shallow limestone creek bed, and slugged the water with his fist. The water ran cold, fast and clear, bubbling and whirling around the soft giggling obstruction.

“Your career has ended. Penguin,” the brown boy said menacingly, rising to a half crouch, hands curled into chubby claws; grappling momentarily with the Penguin, he fell forward into the fast-running white-blue water. Recovering, he sat up, sputtering and shaking his long wet black hair. “Run for the the hovercraft,” he said, clamping his brown eyes shut and wiping his dark, lean face. The Penguin had escaped.

“What do you want him to be when he grows up?” Taylor asked.

“Besides Batman?” Wendy turned her shoulders and, closing her eyes thoughtfully, let the sun bake into her face.

Taylor watched as the boy leaped on another invisible archfiend, dragging him down to cold, wet justice in Dead Man Creek. Standing and dusting his tiny hands, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of the red swimsuit, Randall searched with his large, round, dark eyes for an as yet unimagined horror.

“Come on, Boy Wonder. We’re finished here.” Randall trudged upstream, leaving fully administered justice in his wake, a serious but satisfied look on his face. Leaning down, he picked up a flat piece of limestone off the creek bottom and popped the white rock in his mouth.

“Hey! Batman!” Taylor yelled, “Don’t get too far upstream. There are holes....”

Randall spit the rock back into his hand and yelled without looking back, “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my boss, or my father, or my mother, or anything.”

“The kid is harsh in his judgments. What does he mean, ‘or anything’?” Taylor turned to Wendy. Her eyes closed, she was smiling and thinking and facing the sun.

“Come on, Randall, I’m at least one thing,” Taylor yelled back to the boy. “I’m
bigger than you.
”

“You’re crazy. My momma even told me so.” The boy turned back upstream and popped the rock back into his mouth.

Taylor turned and nudged Wendy. “You better give the orders. There
are
some big holes in the creek bed.”

“Randall!” Wendy yelled as she turned away from the sun and opened her eyes. “Randall? Where is he?”

“Up there.” He pointed upstream, his gaze following his arm, but Randall Ryan wasn’t where Taylor’s finger pointed.

“Where?” Wendy’s voice trembled.

Taylor looked along both banks; Randall had disappeared. Vanished.

“Oh, shit!”

Taylor sprang feetfirst off the high boulder. Hitting the water, Taylor had misjudged his jump, skinning his leg on the upstream edge of Panther Hole. But the long leap had put him closer to the spot where he’d last seen the boy, and hitting the shallow edge kept his head above water; he never lost sight of the dark water he reasoned had swallowed Randall.

“Randall! Randall! Randall!”

Scrambling up the creek bed against the fast, shallow current, Taylor heard Wendy screaming somewhere in his mind, but all he saw was the dark hole. The crystal-clear cool water turned to glue; the creek’s force increased; each step seemed interminable.
Don’t panic
, he told himself, checking his landmarks to make certain he was heading for the right hole. Stumbling against a rock, Taylor slipped and fell down. Quickly he scrambled back to his feet. The force of the Dead Man was eroding his balance, his control, his strength, his courage. For an eternal moment the struggle seemed a stalemate, then Taylor broke free and staggered to the dark hole. The rushing water clutched at him like fear. He fought for control, pausing again, checking his landmarks.
Make certain.
He stepped back and studied the dark hole, the shoreline, the oak tree and the rock.
Was this the place?

Wendy, frozen to the rock, knowing she was being punished, screamed and screamed. “Randall! Oh, God, Randall! Randall! Don’t hide from Mother, Randall! Randall! Randall!” She was the shriek of the storm while Taylor kept looking and thinking.

Don’t panic.

Trying to remember his emergency training, Taylor recalled only what to do for vomiting old ladies and emphysemic drunks.

Don’t panic; he hasn’t been under long. Make sure this is the right hole.
Taylor looked into the dark green hole, searching for forms, shapes, colors. His son.

Calling the boy’s name repeatedly, Wendy’s terrified cries turned into a pulsing, keening animal wail. Tommy McNamara heard her all the way up in the bunkhouse with his stereo playing. The haunting sound reached Bob, Wendy’s bodyguard—who was never far away—and his partner, Toby, in their white Ford at the cattle guard behind Coon Ridge. They all headed for Dead Man Creek.

Taylor decided he had the hole that got the boy. He carefully studied it, sticking his head into the water and looking, walking along the edge of the green water, concentrating, considering, knowing once he made his move into the hole that there was no second choice. No second guess. No excuse. Fear clawed at his mind but he kept moving, letting the terror flow through him like water. He must take control, put the adrenaline to work for him, let
it
push
him.
Discipline. Execution. Concentration. Speed.

It was a deep hole, ground by water and time out of an upthrust limestone block. The boy had stepped off an underwater cliff, dropping fifty feet into the eroded hole.

“No! No! No!” Wendy knew this was to be her punishment for being happy, for loving her son, for loving Taylor; their son would become nothing. Control was again revealed to be futile reaction.

Taylor backed off, changing angles for the sun, continuing to look into the hole, trying to find a ray to the bottom; years of sediment waited to stir once he went down.

He began to breathe deeper—filling, stretching his lungs, gorging his blood with oxygen. He had one dive to find the boy. One lungful of air. He breathed deeper; the sound of his respiration echoed off the rocks, waiting, searching the dark green void. One chance.

A flash of red? The water wobbled and the red was gone. Was that a red shoe? A red suit?

Taylor made his decisions and sucked in his final breath of air. He would search all the way to the bottom, then scour the bottom. Finally, oxygen exhausted, he would not quit, he would search until failure brought Death. One trip.

As he dove Taylor saw clouds of black sediment billowing up toward him. The boy was down there, putting up a hell of a fight, judging by the size of the dark plume growing toward the surface. Taylor swam straight down into the black cloud. It burned his eyes and blurred his vision; he barely glimpsed his own hands in front of him. The water rippled and swirled up from below—the force of the boy’s desperate fight to survive. Taylor swam straight down toward the eye of the struggle. Faster. Faster.

He never saw Randall, just a red blur as a rubber-soled shoe kicked his face. Taylor grabbed at the small ankle, but the boy kicked away, terrified and lost without the guide of gravity in the black swirling depths. The boy was swimming down, heading deeper, thinking he was swimming up.

Taylor swam after him, thirty feet deep or more, catching glimpses of red as the water turned colder. His ears ached. Taylor kicked and clawed, digging deeper into the cold water, searching into the black. He lost the red; he felt nothing, no turmoil or struggle. Deathly still.

Taylor stopped, turned in the black cloud, spread out his arms and legs and waited. And hoped.

Randall Ryan was motionless and weightless in the water. The small boy had given up the struggle for life and had settled for peace.

After a fifteen-second eternity the boy’s head bumped gently into Taylor’s foot. Another two inches and they would not have touched, floating inches apart in the cold black forever.

Taylor Rusk stuck the cold, thin body under his arm and kicked toward what he hoped was the surface and not some refraction of the sunlight in the churning black water, drawing them ever deeper. His lungs began to ache and he began to slowly exhale, relieving the pressure of the carbon dioxide buildup but also losing any residual oxygen left in his lungs.

The boy did not move. Taylor clutched him tightly.
Faster!

Taylor had exhaled completely, his lungs exhausted; the surface seemed no closer. No matter how hard he kicked, the light seemed farther away. Out of reach, feeling a sharp pain in his chest and tasting blood in his mouth, Taylor kicked and reached out desperately toward the fading light. He kicked one last time. He couldn’t keep the water out of his lungs.

The light faded. All black. Dead.

Bob Travers grabbed Taylor’s hand as it broke the surface, snatching the man and the little boy out of the water like rag dolls, dragging them onto the shallow creek bed.

Prying Randall loose from Taylor’s grip, Bob lay the boy stomach-down along his sinewy arm. The boy’s once-red lips were deep blue, the beautiful soft face in cold sleep. Cradling the boy’s head in his large hand, Bob thumped between the shoulder blades, then pried the tiny blue lips apart. No water ran out.

“He’s still got a heartbeat.” Bob pressed his ear to the boy’s back. “But ... he’s not breathing.”

Taylor was half-conscious, gulping air.

“He’s not breathing!” Bob repeated, using his hands to try to force the lungs to breathe by pumping the little chest.

“He may have swallowed his tongue,” Taylor gasped out.

Bob stuck a big finger into the blue mouth. Finding the tongue in place, he covered the small nose and mouth with his rough cracked lips. Bob tried to force air into the lungs.

The small chest did not rise.

Tommy McNamara came running down the bluff and splashing into the water. Wendy howled from the rock.

Taylor struggled to his knees and forced open the boy’s jaws, looking down his throat. He barely saw the white stone lodged past the soft palate. His finger could not reach it.

“Something’s stuck in his throat,” he said to Bob. “See if you can reach it.”

Bob dug into the boy’s mouth while Taylor looked around wildly. Tommy McNamara stood beside him, his gold ballpoint pen hanging from the neck of his Santa Fe Opera T-shirt.

“I can’t reach it,” Bob said, turning the boy face down and trying to squeeze it out compressing the small cold rib cage with one hand while pressing up against the diaphragm with the other hand.

“Goddam son of a bitch! Come out of there! Goddammit ... Goddammit!” Bob Travers was no longer calm and low-key.

“Stop! You’ll break his ribs.”

“He’s dying! Better broken ribs than dead.”

“Turn him over.”

Bob flopped the blue-faced boy on his back. Taylor’s hand palpated the hollow of the boy’s cold neck, fingers feeling for the cartilage at the soft hollow between the collarbones.

Which was it, now? Above? Below?

He snatched Tommy McNamara’s ballpoint pen, clicked out the point and plunged it into the boy’s slender throat.

Wendy scrambled up just as he drove the hole into their child’s throat. She screamed and lunged for Taylor, but Bob caught her, then Tommy held her away. Taylor pulled the pen out, leaving a neat red round puncture. Wendy kept screaming, but Taylor and Bob heard the whistling hiss. The boy had begun to breathe again. The cold blue color retreated from his face as oxygen filled his lungs and bloodstream. The small chest rose and fell; air passed through the bloody hole in Randall’s throat below the rock, the tiny chip of the limestone land.

Bob’s partner came scrambling down the bluff with the white Ford’s emergency kit.

“Jesus, who made this mess?” With a pair of forceps he pulled a limestone rock from Randall’s throat. “We have to get him to a hospital,” the partner said as Bob wrapped his shirt around the cold little body. “Who stuck this goddam hole in him? Could have severed an artery.”

“Forget it, Toby, you’re second guessing. We don’t do that in this business.” Bob still cradled the boy in his arms. One big hand easily held the large head. The brown eyes flickered open.

“Hi, Bob,” the little boy croaked. “My throat hurts.” Then, he saw his mother sobbing and he began to cry too.

Toby ran splattering across the creek bed in his cowboy boots. Bob walked swiftly behind, clutching the crying boy. Wendy ran alongside Bob, soothing the boy and wiping her own eyes.

Taylor Rusk stood up, wobbly in the shallow creek bed. Tommy helped him to his feet. Taylor took one last look at the dark hole, now a churning mass of sediment, a cloud of death.

“Jesus!” Taylor, gasping for air, gazed into the swirling black green. “Blind fucking luck.” Then he leaned over and vomited bright-red blood into Dead Man Creek.

T
OMMY
M
C
N
AMARA HELD
the pen in one hand while he kept the other around Taylor’s waist. Taylor used Tommy’s shoulder for support in walking back up the bluff to the ranch house, stopping several times to cough up blood. Taylor began to shiver. He was scared ... frightened to his soul.