The Last Exit to Normal (8 page)

She raised an eyebrow. “Like yours?”

“I said ‘usually.’ What was she like?”

“Nice. She used to walk Billy to the park and stuff all the time. They kept to themselves mostly,
though. Her family was Jehovah’s Witness, and they sort of disowned her when she went Pentecostal. Daddy
says she probably had enough of both and just left. Couldn’t take it anymore.”

CHAPTER 11

W
e drove in silence for a long time, then, and when Kimberly turned onto a
dirt driveway, I saw the farm. The barn was bigger than the house. “That’s a big barn.”

She smiled. “Can’t turn back now, city boy.”

“Just saying.” As we came around the corner, I saw a huge flatbed truck stacked with
bales of hay. “I thought we were going to bale hay.”

“We are.”

I pointed. “That’s full. They’re already made.”

She laughed. “Did you think that we’d make them ourselves? Machines do that.
It’s our job to take them into the barn.”

The stack suddenly grew. “Like with a machine?”

“No, like with our hands. Come on.”

We walked up to the truck, and there was a note taped to the driver’s-side window. Kimberly
read it, then nodded. “My uncle’s tractor broke down near Grogan’s Flat.”

“Where’s that?”

She pointed past the farmhouse. “Six hundred acres that way.”

An acre could be a mile, for all I knew. “So what do we do?”

She looked at the sky. The clouds we’d seen from the highway were now piled like a wall of
black over the farmhouse, ominous and huge in the big sky. “We get the tarps out.”

I looked at the clouds over the house. “For us?”

She ran into the barn, calling to me, “For the hay! Come on, I want to get this done and get out to
Uncle Morgan.”

“Why?”

She pointed to the storm. “It’s going to be big. They come on fast and can be
dangerous.”

I followed her into the barn, the musty smell of heat and hay filling my lungs. “Just call
him.”

She went to a corner and grabbed a heavy-duty green tarp. “No service out there, and he leaves
his phone home most times. He’s sort of old-fashioned.”

Just then a boom of thunder hit my ears. Not a rumble or a crack, but an
explosion.
I jumped as
the rafters shook, filaments of hay falling on my head. “You weren’t joking, were you?”

She ran outside. “Grab those straps!”

I looked around, feeling like a dork again, and saw a bundle of straps hanging on the wall near the tarps. I
wrapped my arms around them and ran out just as the rain hit, and just like everything else in Rough Butte, it
didn’t just start, it made a statement. One second it was dry; the next I was getting pummeled. The drops were
so big and coming down so fast, it almost hurt. I was instantly drenched.

Kimberly heaved the tarp on top of the fifteen-foot wall of hay, then grabbed ahold of the bale wires and
clambered to the top. The rain came down so hard, I could barely see the farmhouse fifty yards away, and then she was
yelling at me again. “Get the other tarp and throw it up to me!”

I dropped the straps and ran to the barn, fumbling with my gloves before I took the tarp out and tried to
throw it to her. She’d made it look like a piece of cake, and as I threw the heavy thing again, I nearly ripped the
muscles from my shoulders trying. It made it, though, and she started spreading it across the back half of the hay. The
sides flapped down, blowing in the wind as the world lit up like a strobe light.

Half a second later, the thunder shook my teeth. I stood there, looking up at her, almost in awe as this
beautiful and willowy girl danced back and forth on a fifteen-foot-tall mountain of hay in the most hellacious storm
I’d ever been in.

“Get the straps and attach them to the corners and along the bottom!” she yelled, the pour
of the rain muffling her voice as she worked. “There’s hooks on the edge of the truck to attach them!
Hurry!”

It took me a second to untangle the straps I’d thrown on the now muddy ground, and another
second to find the hooks on the truck. They had it set up so you didn’t have to tie anything, and there was a
buckle you pulled on to cinch the strap tight. I yanked, then ran around the truck to the other side, doing the same.
Kimberly climbed down and we piggybacked each other, going down the line and securing everything.

By the time we got done, I knew I should have been freezing cold, but I wasn’t. My heart
hammered in my chest like a mallet. The rain hit like ice balls, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees in a
matter of minutes. We ran to the pickup and hopped in, Kimberly firing it up and turning on the heater.

I couldn’t hear the engine run for the racket drumming down on the hood and the top of the cab,
and as I wiped the water from my eyes, she flipped on the wipers full blast and put the truck in gear. I looked out the
window. I’d never been in a storm so bad that the water splashing
up
from the ground made a hazy fog
up to the bumper of the truck. I shook my head as another boom of thunder vibrated through us. “This is
crazy.”

Kimberly, cranking the wheel and giving it gas, didn’t crack a smile. “It’s not
over.”

“Where are we going?”

“Grogan’s Flat. Uncle Morgan is still out there.”

“Won’t he just come home?”

She shook her head. “You don’t know Uncle Morgan.”

I supposed that meant the guy would stay out no matter if the world cracked in half and swallowed him
whole. The rain poured harder, almost to the point where you couldn’t see even with the wipers going full bore,
and as Kimberly took a right onto a dirt trail going through the fields, she slowed.

Mud sucked at the tires and she downshifted, then yanked on a shorter stick shift near the floorboard. The
truck jerked. “What’s that?”

“Four-wheel drive. We might get stuck.”

I felt the shift as the front wheels grabbed the mud, and we bounced and sloshed and slid along the track.
For as flat as this part of Montana was, there were gullies and ravines and slopes that I’d not noticed before, and
we almost slid off the track a couple of times. “What happens if we get stuck?” I asked.

“We don’t get stuck.”

Ten minutes later, after several incredibly hairy moments in the truck, the track went from mud to a
running stream. Kimberly gunned the engine up a slope, the tires spitting mud and water up the sides of the windows as
they gripped the slippery hill. I could only sit and marvel. My future wife could do
anything,
and I realized I was
having the best time of my life. “This is awesome.”

She smiled. “Nice first date, huh?”

“The best.”

She searched through the rain, the headlights barely cutting through the wall of water blanketing the
fields. “Keep an eye out for the tractor. We should be coming up on it soon.”

I couldn’t see fifty yards in any direction. “What’s it look like?”

“Big and green.”

A few minutes later, I spotted a hulking shape in the distance, through the passenger window.
“There it is!”

She slowed, then cranked the wheel, churning up the hill and winding the engine up. “This
isn’t good.”

“What?”

She looked ahead as she drove. “He’s on a side slope.”

“What does that mean?”

She sped up, all four tires spinning as we ground our way closer. She peered through the rain. “It
slid. Crap.” As we neared and the tractor was clearly visible, she gasped. “Oh God. It tipped
over.”

I looked, noticing Morgan’s own pickup parked at the crest of the hill, fifteen yards from the big
machine. I’d never seen whatever kind of tractor it was, but I could see the huge rear wheel sticking up in the
sky. “How did it tip?”

“When it rains this hard, the soil can’t hold the water. The weight of the tractor will
make the surface give way.” A tinge of panic hit her voice as we came to a stop near the toppled thing. She left
the engine running and jumped out, slipping and sliding up the rest of the slope.

I grabbed my cowboy hat and hopped out, following as fast as I could in the shadow of the clouds and
hammering rain. The air lit up three times with lightning, one clap after another as the thunder deafened me. I fell, sunk
to my wrist in mud, and scrambled up. I could hear Kimberly screaming her uncle’s name over the noise as she
circled around the tractor.

I finally reached it, scrambling around the opposite way from where she searched for him. Then I saw
him. He and I looked at each other through the rain, and his eyes, filled with pain, blazed into mine. He reminded me of
a trapped animal, angry and hurt. I screamed for Kimberly, and as she came around the corner and saw her uncle pinned
under the machine, her eyes widened. She fell to her knees beside him, me following suit. His hips were smashed under
the frame of the cab. He looked at her. “It’s going to slide more, Kim, and I’m going with it.
Get away.”

She looked at his smashed legs, then bolted up. “Come on, Ben.”

I looked at her, not believing she would leave.

She ran toward her truck.
“Come on!”
she screamed, and I followed her. We
reached the truck, and I realized she was a step away from being hysterical. “Grab that shovel in the bed and go
back up. Hurry!” Then she popped open a toolbox and scrounged through it. I ran back up to Morgan with the
shovel. He looked at me through the rain and I asked him if he was all right. The words sounded hollow. Blood seeped
from his mouth, and through his torn shirt I could see that the first impact had crushed his ribs before the tractor slid to
his legs. He wasn’t all right. He was dying.

“Get on out of here, boy, and you take my Kim with you.”

Then she was there beside me, with several thick blocks of wood. She stared at her uncle, then turned to
me, her knees in inches of muck. “Start digging him out, then use the wood to brace it if you can. I’m
going for help.”

I stared at her.

She dropped the blocks. “You can’t drive, Ben. Not in this. I’ll be back as soon
as I can. Just get him out before it goes.”

I nodded, a bolt of lightning illuminating the panic on my face. Then she was gone, running back to her
truck. When Morgan saw what was going on, he leaned his head against the ground and closed his eyes. I studied his
midsection, and it was already swelling. I could actually see the broken ribs poking the skin out. I grabbed the shovel.
“I’ll try not to hurt you.”

He clenched his jaw. “Already does. Just do it.”

I started digging, afraid I’d cause the tractor to move.

“Hard and fast, boy; don’t be afraid.” He winced. “You see this thing go,
you get your ass away from it, understand? I won’t have your death on my name.”

I accidentally hit him in the leg with the blade of the shovel. He grunted. I kept digging.
“Sorry.”

He looked at me. “What’s your name?”

“Ben.”

He laughed, then coughed up blood, then groaned. “Figures I’d die with a
stranger.”

I ignored him, digging furiously even as the mud oozed back into the hole I was digging under him.
“I’m not a stranger now, and if you die, your niece is going to kill me.” I jammed two blocks of
wood under the cab, but they sunk in.

“Got a liking for her, do you?” he muttered.

I dug. The mud sucked at the shovel and fought me the whole way, and my arms ached as I slung load
after load to the side. It didn’t seem like I was making any difference, and then the machine shifted, sliding a
few inches to the side and grinding against his legs. A deep moan came from Morgan and I dug faster, panic and fear
flooding my chest with adrenaline. My ruined hands didn’t even hurt I was so scared.

Morgan groaned. “Get out.”

“Shut up.” I could barely talk, and it came out a gasp. I was tired of being told to go
away. Rivulets of water ran down the slope, filling the trench I was making beside him. “Shit.”

He laughed. “Nothing like a good rain.”

I began digging under him, scooping out mud as quickly as I could and ignoring his pain as I bumped him
with the shovel. Time dragged on forever, and the only way I could tell that it was passing was my shoulders screaming
at me, the air that wouldn’t get to my lungs, and a dying man cracking jokes about the rain.

So I dug. I dug like a madman until I thought I couldn’t do any more; then I dug some more.
Morgan leveraged his elbows into the muddy stubble, crying out as he inched himself to the side. “Keep going,
boy.”

I kept going, and a few minutes later, I leaned over his chest and grabbed his shoulders. “Going
to hurt again, but you’re going to have to help.” Then I yanked, digging my knees in and pulling him out
from under the mud. This time he screamed, but in a few seconds we were clear of the machine. He lay panting on his
back, his legs a mangled mess of broken bones. I leaned over again and puked, stars coming to my eyes as the rain
poured on us.

The lightning and thunder were almost nonstop now, and I eyed Morgan’s truck fifteen yards up
the hill. “How long will it take for her to get back?”

He closed his eyes, the rain falling on his face as he gasped. More blood seeped from his mouth.
“Too long.”

I looked at the truck again. “I’ll be right back.” I staggered to the truck, the mud
sucking at my boots with every step and my head spinning. The keys were in it, so I cranked the ignition. I’d
driven enough to get around fine on paved streets, but I’d never driven a truck, and I’d certainly never
driven one through a mud bog in Eastern Montana. I cursed myself. He’d die if I fucked this up.

The truck was an automatic, thank God, and I put it in gear, taking a minute to turn the lights on and find
the wipers. I eased the truck down the slope, letting the idle take it closer to Morgan, then jumped out and ran to him.
“Can you help me get you in the truck?”

He looked at the door. “I’ll try.”

I got behind him and slung my arms under his, helping him to a sitting position. He gritted his teeth and
tried to get a foot underneath himself, and I lifted. He screamed again, and we both fell. Then he was silent, his eyes
closed. I sat there, gasping and panting and miserable as he lay unconscious next to me. I had to get him in. I
couldn’t lift him, though. Not with the muck and mud and my arms like wet noodles.

I felt tears coming, and the familiar fear of always messing things up when it meant the most gripped me.
No. Not anymore. Ben the screwed-up teenager didn’t have a place here. Then I thought of Kimberly’s
brother smirking at my hat. He’d be able to do this. These stupid rednecks could do anything, and I
wasn’t about to let this man die.