“Let’s all go,” Cal suggested. “This might be some fun.”
They scrambled out of the bunker and ran toward their trucks. Neal followed them.
“We can all fit into two!” Cal yelled as he started his truck. “You coming, Carey?”
“Wouldn’t miss it!” Neal yelled. Which is goddamn true.
He hopped in the back of Cal’s truck just as Cal hit the gas and sped out.
“I wouldn’t have believed that of Bob Hansen,” Peggy said after Steve related the story of his visit.
“He told me himself,” Steve said. “I was so damn mad I could have punched his lights out right there. But I figured I’d done about enough of that.”
Peggy set a plate of chicken-fried steak down on the table and said, “Barb never would have stood for this nonsense.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’d have ever gotten involved if he still had Barb. Grief does strange things.”
She sat down at the table with her own plate and started to cut a piece of meat. “It shouldn’t turn a man into a bigot, though. It’s going to be awfully hard being neighbors, though, and…oh, shit!”
“What?”
“Shelly’s in town with Jory.”
Steve set down his fork and headed out the door.
The kids were finishing dessert at Wong’s when Cal and the boys came through the door.
Neal lingered in the background, trying to fool himself that he could stay close enough to keep things under control but not be seen.
“Hey, Jory!” Cal yelled. “Your daddy sent us to fetch you!”
Cal took a second to grin at Shelly and let his eyes wander over her body.
“Is he all right?” Shelly asked.
“Oh, he’s okay, just a little excited at the moment,” Cal answered. “Hey, Jory, guess what-”
Neal stepped up to the booth and said, “Jory, your father wants you to come home now.”
“Neal?” Shelly asked. Her scared, bewildered look cut into him.
“Yeah, he’s got news for you!” Cal said, elbowing his way past Neal. “Seems like your girliefriend here is a Jew.”
“Come on, Jory,” Neal said quietly.
Jory looked at Shelly. “Is that true?”
She shrugged her shoulders and looked around. The gang had formed a semicircle around the booth, trapping her in. Evelyn had come out of the kitchen and was standing in the background.
“Yeah, I guess… I think Daddy’s…”
“Think nothing,” said Cal. “Daddy’s a Jew. Boy, Jory, I hope we got to you in time. I hope you haven’t screwed this little-”
Shelly stood up in the booth and slapped him.
Evelyn hurried out the door.
Neal stood in paralyzed horror. He was watching a young girl being tortured and trying to stack that up against the potential life of another child.
Cal rubbed his face and grinned, then said, “I don’t suppose screwing a Jew is much different than screwing a nigger.”
“Let me out of here,” Shelly demanded.
Nobody moved. Jory sat frozen in his seat with his face in his hands.
“Jory?” Shelly asked. “Jory? Jory, for God’s sake, say something! Jory?”
He slowly lifted his head and looked at her.
She smiled at him, a don’t-we-live-in-a-world-of-fools smile. An it-doesn’t-matter-because-we-love-each-other smile. She slid her hand across the table to take his.
“Jew bitch,” he hissed. “Goddamn Jew bitch.”
The boys hollered and whooped and slapped his back.
“Goddamn Jew bitch tried to get me to screw her last night! Jory shouted.
There was more whooping and hollering and Shelly just fell apart right there, curled up into a ball and sobbed.
Every human instinct Neal Carey had screamed at him to go hold her and take her out of the restaurant. But he kept his cover and just stood there.
“Let me out,” Shelly moaned. “Let me out.”
“Come on, Jew,” Cal said. “You wanna screw us all?”
“Yeah, you want to screw us all?” Randy Carlisle echoed. “Do you, Jew?”
“Neal, help me!” Shelly cried.
All eyes were on him.
“Neal, please!”
He looked at her and shook his head.
“You know, Shelly,” Cal said, “you really oughta let folks know that you’re a Jew, maybe wear one of them Stars of David on your sleeve-”
“You let that child up or I’ll shoot your damn head off!” Evelyn was standing five feet in back of them, the shotgun at her shoulder pointed straight at Cal.
They all turned to look at her.
“Evelyn, you wouldn’t use that thing,” Cal said.
“Cal Strekker, I’m an old lady and my hands shake and this is a hair trigger. Now you let that child pass.”
Cal and Randy parted to make space for Shelly to get up.
“Come on, honey,” Evelyn said. She held the shotgun in one arm and stretched out the other hand to Shelly. Shelly got up slowly and Evelyn cradled her in her free arm. “Now all you scum get out. And don’t be coming into my store, neither. I don’t want your business.”
“If we was Jews or niggers you’d have to serve us,” Randy said. “It’s because we’re white men we have no rights in our own country.”
“I’ll serve any human being that comes into my place, but you’re just garbage.” She held the sobbing girl as she turned away. “Come on, honey, I’ll take you home.”
Cal yelled after her, “You think you can survive without the business of the Hansen Cattle Company?”
She turned back to him. “Stack all of you up against a man like Steve Mills and you don’t come to a thimbleful of piss. And everyone in this town feels the way I do. You tell your boss that. Tell him I don’t want to see him or his ever again.”
She turned to Neal, “And you, Neal Carey. The Mills took you in when you was down and out and this is how you repay them. You’re worse than any of these vermin.” She spat on her floor and walked outside.
Cal went out into the street after them and the rest followed.
“Jew lover! Jew bitch!”
Neal stood on the sidewalk and watched as the old lady helped Shelly up the street toward her house. Shelly was doubled over, holding her stomach and crying.
Which was the first thing Steve Mills saw as he raced the truck into town. He took one look at his daughter and the jeering gang of Hansen’s cowboys, heard the cries of “Jew bitch,” grabbed his rifle off the rack in back of him, and jumped out of the cab.
“Look out!” Randy yelled.
The cowboys ran for their trucks as Steve came pacing up the street. Cal grabbed his own rifle and got behind his truck. Vetter did the same. Randy pulled a cheap pistol from under his coat. Dave ducked down behind Vetter’s truck and Jory sprawled flat on the ground under Cal’s.
Neal Carey stood on the sidewalk.
Steve ignored them, walked straight up the street, and gently took his daughter from Evelyn.
“Did they touch you, darlin’?” he asked.
Shelly shook her head.
He put his arms around his daughter and walked her slowly past the cowboys’ trucks toward his own. He opened the passenger door and lifted her inside. Then he started to walk back up the street toward the gang. Cal and Vetter shouldered their rifles and took aim, steadying the barrels on the trucks’ hoods. Seemingly oblivious of the three guns pointed at him, Steve walked back up the street toward Neal.
Neal stepped out into the center of the street, trying to put himself between Steve and the guns without making it obvious. Steve stopped a few paces from him.
“You coming with us?” he asked Neal.
Neal felt every eye and ear in the whole damn world on him. He even felt Karen’s, and she wasn’t even there. He felt Levine’s and Graham’s and The Man’s and Anne Kelley’s and Cody McCall’s.
“No,” he said.
“You with them now?” Steve made a contemptuous gesture toward the men hiding behind the trucks.
“Yeah.”
“You were on my side last night.”
So the tracks have come together, Neal thought. Not somewhere over the horizon, but right here, right now. And now they’ll go in different directions. And you can’t have one foot on both anymore.
“Last night,” Neal said, forcing himself to look his former friend in the eyes, “I didn’t know you were a kike.”