Heather Gudenkauf - One Breath Away

“I’m already here,” Todd said when Will mentioned he was on his way and would meet him in front of the school.

Broken Branch School was a twenty-minute drive over gravel and county roads and Will made the trip in just less than twelve. As he pulled into the school parking lot he could see that a crowd had already formed. Inaudible shouts rose from the pack and were swept away by gusts of wind. Will looked down at his Mossberg on the seat next to him, trying to decide whether or not to bring it out with him. His cell phone erupted in a mind-numbing thrum of rap music that Augie programmed in as his ringtone. She thought it was hilarious whenever a torrent of curses set to music would explode from his phone in the middle of dinner or worse in public at the café or the grocery store. “Dammit, Augie,” he would say, pressing frantically at the buttons, trying to silence the phone.

“What?” Augie said innocently. “You say those words all the time.”

P.J. would nod his head gravely in agreement. “You do,” he would say.

“Hello,” Will barked into the phone.

“Will?” came the timid reply, so unlike Marlys. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine. How are you? How’s Holly?” Will asked, looking through the windshield at four of the Broken Branch police officers trying to manage the growing crowd.

“She still has a fever and isn’t eating,” Marlys explained in a trembling voice. “How’re the kids?”

“Fine, fine,” Will said again. “P.J. has been a big help with the calving. He’s a natural cattleman.”

“And Augie?”

“Augie’s …” Will couldn’t bring himself to say anything negative about his granddaughter when he had no idea as to her safety at this moment. “Augie is trying,” he finished. Which was true. She had even joined him and P.J. in the barn the other day where number 135, a gorgeous Hereford with a shaggy red-and-white coat, was giving birth. Augie watched in awe as the calf dropped from his mother’s uterus, slick with afterbirth but undeniably beautiful.

“Ohhh,” Augie breathed, getting caught up in the excitement, her eyes shining, a smile appearing from her normally glowering face.

Another truck pulled in next to his and Will recognized fellow farmers Neal and Ned Vinson. Will tipped his chin in greeting and saw that the brothers had also come heavily armed.

“Will?” Marlys said tentatively. “You sound funny. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Will said, immediately regretting the sharpness of his voice.

“Are you taking your pills?” she asked, referring to the high blood pressure medication she constantly had to remind him to take.

“Yes, yes, I’m taking my pills.” Will’s eyes followed the Vinson brothers as they moved purposefully toward the school, their shotguns nestled in the crooks of their arms.

“Then what’s going on?” Marlys said tearfully. “I can’t stand worrying about Holly and have to worry about you and the kids, too. I can’t take it.”

“Nothing to worry about.” Will tried to make his voice sound casual, light. “Augie dyed her hair red. Her head looks like a goddamn rooster’s comb. I just forgot what it’s like to have a teenager in the house.”

“I know something else is going on,” Marlys said sternly, “but I’m too tired to fight with you about it right now and I need to get back to Holly. I’m going to call you tonight and you better be straight with me, got it?”

“Okay,” Will finally answered. Any other excuses would be just lies. Marlys was going to find out what was happening at the school sooner or later. It was best if she heard it from him. Just not this minute.

“All this is so hard.” Marlys sniffled.

“I know, Marlys,” he answered in agreement, though they were talking about two completely different things.

“What day is it?” I ask my mother, whose capable fingers are flying over her knitting. The beginnings of a sweater maybe. Funny, since it’s probably sunny and eighty-eight degrees outside, just like it is almost every day here.

“It’s Thursday, March twenty-fourth.” I’ve been in the hospital for almost exactly eight weeks now. In some ways this seems like an eternity but the days have somehow melded together, one running into the next. Pain, medication, therapy, surgery. A constant cycle of healing. My mother glances up at the clock on the wall, her hands never stopping, the clicking of the needles a comforting sound that I remember from my childhood. “I called your father just a bit ago. He said everyone is doing just fine. P.J. is looking forward to helping your father with the calving.”

When my mother sat down to knit, it was her quiet, relaxing time. I had never seen a person work as hard as my mother did. In the mornings, she was up before anyone else, the smell of coffee and bacon and eggs our alarm clock. After breakfast and the dishes, my mother would go out and help our father with the cattle, feeding and watering them, checking the pasture fences for loose wires or nails that might cause injury. Then she would go back to the house to clean, do laundry, make lunch, go grocery shopping, take care of the needs of five very demanding children and one equally demanding husband, make dinner, do the dishes, help with homework and finally, finally, exhausted, she would be able to sit down for a few moments and knit. Sure, we helped our mother, but there was just so much to do, there was never enough time in the day. Watching the weariness of our mother, though she never complained, I swore that wouldn’t be my life and I knew I would get out of Broken Branch as soon as I was old enough.

“One o’clock, Iowa time,” I say. “I wonder what the kids are doing right this minute.”

Mrs. Oliver looked closely at the man. Getting a clear picture of him wasn’t easy. He had a gray baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead. Little tufts of curly, dark brown hair poked out around his ears. He wore a black jacket zippered up to his chin and sleek leather gloves on his fingers. By the lines that seamed the corners of his blue eyes she figured he had to be at least in his early forties. He seemed overly concerned that two of the students were absent. Lily and Maria. Was one of them his target? If so, why didn’t he just leave to go in search of them instead of remaining in the classroom? Was he in too deeply now, feel that he had nothing to lose?

P.J. was still staring unabashedly at the man and Mrs. Oliver had an inkling that P.J. might know the man, maybe had seen him before.

She wondered briefly if this could actually be Bobby Latham, her former student, forcing her to sit still for an excruciating amount of time just as she had done to him all those years ago. But no. She and Bobby liked each other. Had come to an understanding. She promised to never tell him to face front ever again as long as he didn’t use the pages of his math book to make soggy spitballs that he shot through the barrel of his ink pen at the back of Kitty Rawlings’s head. No, this wasn’t Bobby Latham. Maybe it was another former student.

In her mind she ran through the Filofax of children she had taught over the years. It couldn’t have been Walter Spanksi, the only student she had ever flunked. He would be in his fifties by now. How she had fretted over holding Walter back for another year of third grade. No matter how she had tried to help him learn his multiplication facts and how to read even the most basic of sentences, he just never caught on. She couldn’t very well send him on to fourth grade when he didn’t know a noun from a verb and consistently missed seventeen of the twenty words on the weekly spelling test. It had been her second year of teaching and she remembered vividly sitting in front of Mr. and Mrs. Spanksi, just three months pregnant with her second child, and informing them that Walter, while a very nice boy, would not move up to the fourth grade with his classmates. Mr. Spanksi held his hat in his large, earth-worn hands and pleaded with her to at least give him a chance. A lot could happen over the summer. They could work with him every day, get him a tutor. Mrs. Spanksi didn’t say a word, just cried noiselessly into her handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Spanksi,” Mrs. Oliver said, shaking her head. “I just cannot, in good conscience, promote Walter on to the fourth grade at his current skill level. I am confident that another year in third grade will be just the ticket to get him where he needs to be,” she said chirpily. Well, she had another year with Walter and, as it turned out, another year in third grade did him absolutely no good. Over the course of the additional nine months Mrs. Oliver had with Walter, she saw him transform from a nice boy to a very angry boy whose second shot at the third-grade curriculum showed no marked improvement. But the man with the gun was most definitely not Walter Spanksi, though she could clearly understand why he would be tempted to return to his old classroom where a twenty-three-year-old, second-year teacher had the gall to flunk him, and point a gun at her head. How very satisfying that might be. But Walter was too old to be this man.