Mark Tufo - A Plague Upon Your Family

So I circled back to the original question. How could she ever sleep knowing that at that very minute, a mindless, hungry predator might be closing in. I shuddered. I had reached the front door to the barn, now not nearly as prepared to enter into the gloomy interior.

“They don’t lay in wait Talbot.” I said out loud. It was a trick nearly everyone uses to steel their resolve. I think it’s more to let whatever monster is lurking know that we’re coming in ready or not. I just wish the monster gave the same courtesy. I clicked over the ancient light switch. Two light bulbs lazily lit the room. you could still wear night vision goggles in here and not get any glare through them. The tractor stood dead center in the barn and every deadly implement known to farming kind graced the walls all around me. I was sweating. I felt that it was dignity saving to blame it on the multiple layering I was swathed in.

I had reached the tractor when Justin shouted to me from the door. I realized then my mistake. Not that I was going to shoot Justin or even that he startled me enough to do it accidentally but if someone of ill intent had come up on me, my multi layered fingers couldn’t fit in through the trigger guard. “You are just all sorts of a hot mess, aren’t you Talbot.” I again said out loud to myself.

“I asked if you needed any help Dad.” Justin answered thinking I hadn’t heard his first query, which I hadn’t. I had been whistling demons away at that time.

He looked like shit and five degrees below zero was going to do little to help him. “Sure.” I didn’t know what the cause of his recent detachment to us was but if he was going to throw a lifeline it was my duty to reel him in. “Gotta a gun?”

“What do you think? I’m your son.”

“Smart ass. Okay let’s just do a quick search through the stalls and the loft. This place gives me the willies.”

“You sure it’s not me?” He asked, half of the question was smart ass reply half though was a true question.

I didn’t have a fifty fifty answer. I let it drop. Within minutes we discovered that the only other tenants of the barn were an extended family of field mice. I decided that if they were going to leave us alone then I would follow suit. Yep you guessed it. Mice scare the crap out of me. Yes I’ve been to battle. I’ve killed my fellow man and monsters of myth. It’s just something about that hairless tail that really shoots a spike of fear through me. I don’t really want to talk about it. Just add it onto the growing list of Talbotisms.

The tractor cranked after the third time and a good blast of starting fluid into the carburetor. “You up for doing some plowing?” I asked Justin.

He looked at me like I was pulling his leg. “You serious?”

“Sure go ahead.” I told him. For those of you that thought I did this only because I didn’t want to be out in the North Dakota winter only have it partially correct. Isn’t this part of the reason we have kids at all? So they can do the shit jobs that we used to do. Like taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, shoveling walkways. You don’t really wonder why farm families used to be so huge do you? It’s not because screwing is the only thing to do. It’s because there is so much work to be done. Okay and screwing was really the only form of entertainment.

I stepped back before Justin had the chance to lurch the tractor into gear. The kid really couldn’t so much as drive a nail, if you catch my meaning. He definitely inherited that from his mother. I figured the tractor to be about 8 feet wide and the doors to the barn easily double that width and still I wondered if he would hit the frame. Would that kind of strike be enough to take the ancient structure down? And would we survive being buried by 87 tons of sharpened metal objects? Probably not, I walked out to guide him through. Not bad, I thought, as he had a good six inches of clearance on his left hand side.

“Alright.” I shouted. “Just make a pathway down to the minivan so we can get it back up here.” Justin gave me a thumbs up.

I turned to walk back to the house and hopefully a steaming mug of cocoa. I was lost in the reverie of melted marshmallows when the warning shout came.

“Look out!” Came the distant shout from the house. I looked up towards the porch. Tracy was cupping her hands together for the bullhorn effect. When she realized she had caught my attention she made an over agitated gesture with her arm. I dove to my left, the blade of the plow pushed air past my face, Justin was looking off to his right and had not even noticed that he had almost made me a snow angel. So angel might be a little liberal but it’s more of an analogy. He turned back towards me as he passed. Something between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Damn’ crossed his face. I stood up and brushed the snow off of me, just staring at him as he passed.

I looked back up at the porch Tommy had an expression on his face I couldn’t remember ever seeing. It was rage. The glare he directed at Justin got to me more than the mice. All of a sudden Carol’s house didn’t seem quite as accommodating. We were going to bring our problems with us no matter where we went. I had momentarily let myself get swayed into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t let that happen again. Eliza was still out there and apparently we were of great interest to her. Maybe not me as much, however, we were on her short list for people she wanted dead.

The cocoa was good but I was too distracted to thoroughly enjoy it. Instead of going in and staying in, I sat out on the porch and watched Justin actually do an admirable job of clearing a pathway. He only stopped once as the plow bit into the frozen corpse of a zombie, spreading frozen chunks of meat along a twenty-foot swath of driveway. He hopped down off the tractor, showed the right amount of disgust as he untangled the ensnared carcass. Or was it pity?

I froze twice as much on that porch as I would have if I had stayed on the tractor. I waited until Justin pulled the tractor back into the barn. This time he actually did take off a chunk of door frame. I shuddered thinking that could have been my skull. I heard the engine rattle to an end and then I began my long ascent out of the deck chair. Convinced at this point that the fluid around my knees had completely frozen. My injured knee popped like a firecracker when I got it to full extension. Numbness from the cold kept the pain down to a dull roar. When this thing de-thawed I was going to be whimpering like a kid at Toys ‘R’ Us that didn’t get the Deluxe Batman figurine with a fully stocked utility belt.

“That sounds like it hurt.”

I had been too wrapped up in my own misery to hear Tracy come out.

“Not as much as it’s going to tonight.”

“You going down to get the van?”

It was obvious what I was doing. She was fishing for something. I knew the game. I just rarely if ever won.

“Yeah, figured I’d better get it now before either it or me freezes.”

“You want me to go with you?”

I turned to look at her. “What’s up Hon?”

“What? I can’t walk with my husband.”

“Hold on. That’s not what I said. We both know you like the cold weather about as much as I like ham.” (Did I not tell you about that yet? I’ll get to it eventually.) “And yes I appreciate the company but it’s got to be closing in on negative ten out here and I think a wonderful cooling northerly breeze has begun to kick up. So what gives?”

“Fine let’s walk.”

We were halfway down the driveway before she spoke. But I noticed her turn towards the barn before she said anything.

“What’s going on Mike?” I didn’t need any clarification. If I had, just her previous look to the barn would have erased all doubt of what subject we were broaching. “Mike, Justin was looking right at you as he drove that plow.”