A biker twice my size stomped my deaf granddaughter’s snow cone table flat outside the feed store while she was still sitting at it, then looked straight at me and said, “You let her sit on that?” I went across that wet gravel ready to tear his beard out, and I’d have done it, too, if I hadn’t looked down first.
Ananya is nine. She’s worn hearing aids since she was two.
That Saturday they were zipped in the little pouch on her belt, because the heat after the storm made them whistle every time she bent her head.
So she heard nothing.
She’d set up at the feed store on the highway out of Broken Bow, between the propane cage and the ice machine, on a folding card table with metal legs.
My old shaved ice machine. Four bottles of syrup. A cardboard sign she’d colored with a purple marker that was nearly dead.
Two dollars a cone, for her class trip to the planetarium.
My son Kody ran the orange extension cord out to her from the outlet on the wall.
Last spring his dog had chewed a spot near the middle of it. He’d wrapped that in black electrical tape.
“It’s outdoor rated, Mom,” he said. “Quit hovering.”
So I quit hovering.
I sat in my Oldsmobile with the air on and did the crossword, close enough to see her and far enough that she’d stop rolling her eyes at me.
The storm had come through an hour before and left the gravel full of brown puddles. She’d made thirty-one dollars anyway, in a pickle jar.
I was stuck on a seven-letter word for a heron when the motorcycles pulled in.
Nine of them, coming off the highway one behind the other and backing in along the chain-link fence, engines popping.
Ananya lit up. She can’t hear them, but she feels them come up through the ground, and she loves them more than anything.
The last man off was the biggest. Short silver beard, silver hair cut close, a worn black vest and nothing under it, old faded tattoos all the way down both arms.
He walked straight to her table and didn’t reach for his wallet.
He stood at the end of it with his arms at his sides and looked down. Not at her. At the gravel under her chair.
Then he said something to her. Loud.
She smiled and held up a paper cone, because she hadn’t caught a word.
“GET UP, HONEY. UP.”
She tipped her head the way she does when she’s trying to read a mouth through a beard.
And he put his boot into the table.
He drove his heel into the near leg so hard the table folded in half. The machine went over into the mud. The syrup went with it, and the pickle jar, and quarters rolled everywhere.
Ananya went over backward off her chair onto the gravel.
A woman at the gas pump screamed.
He didn’t look at either of them. He stepped over the mess, went to the wall and yanked something out of it.
I was already out of the car.
I don’t remember the lot. I remember my sandals filling up with water and the noise coming out of me.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”
He turned around. Up close he was a wall, rain dripping off his shoulders, his face hard as a shovel blade.
“You let her sit on that?” he said.
I pushed him, my palms flat on the leather. He didn’t give an inch.
“She’s NINE. She can’t HEAR you. She was selling snow cones.”
“I know what she was doing, ma’am.”
Ananya was sitting in the gravel with blue syrup down the front of her shirt, crying without a sound, which is how she cries and which is worse than screaming.
I got down beside her. Her hands were shaking.
He crouched on her other side, too close, and I almost hit him again.
He didn’t touch her. He reached under her chair, lifted the orange cord out of the puddle by a dry stretch, and held the middle of it up in front of my face.
Kody’s tape had slid. Two inches of copper were showing, and the plastic around it had gone black and bubbled.
The water under her chair had been live.
Nobody had heard it. He’d seen it from the end of the table, a little fizz on the puddle right where her sneakers were.
“Her feet were in that,” he said. “Her hand was on the metal leg.”
“The breaker would’ve…”
“That outlet’s older than I am. Nothing on it trips.” He tipped his head at the wall. “I pulled it.”
He stood up and stared me down. “Who taped this?”
I didn’t answer.
Kody’s name sat in my throat like a pill.
Ananya had stopped crying. She was staring at her jar, upside down in the mud, and at the paper cones floating in the puddle like little boats.
One of the other riders, a younger man, bald as an egg, was already on his knees picking quarters out of the gravel one at a time.
Another one stood by the wall with his phone, taking pictures of the outlet.
The woman from the pump told me later the big one’s name was Reuben.
He picked up the folded table, turned it over and looked at the leg he’d kicked. It had bent at the hinge.
“Cheap,” he said.
“It’s what we had.”
“Not talking about the table.”
He leaned it against the fence. Then he fished the purple sign out of the puddle, shook it off and held it out to Ananya.
She took it, pressed it flat against her shirt and wouldn’t look at him.
To her he was the meanest man alive. It was all over her face.
He’d been that to me too. Four minutes earlier.
He wrote on the back of a feed receipt, folded it twice and put it in my hand. “When’s her daddy home?”
“Six.”
“Tell him Sunday.”
They rode out without buying a drop of gas.
I didn’t unfold the receipt until I was back in the Oldsmobile, and when I did, I had to read it three times.
On Sunday at nine in the morning, fourteen motorcycles came up our street in a line and backed into the gravel along Kody’s driveway.
The last one was pulling a little flatbed trailer with something on it under a blue tarp, square, about as tall as Ananya.
Kody came out on the porch in his socks with his coffee.
Reuben got off, pulled his gloves off one finger at a time, and walked up the driveway past the tarp without touching it.
“You Kody?” he said.
The Walmart bag
“Yeah,” Kody said. “Who’s asking?”
Reuben didn’t give his name. He looked past Kody to me, at the bottom of the porch steps, where I’d been standing since eight-thirty.
“You bring it?”
I had it in a Walmart bag. It had been in my purse all night, then on my kitchen table, then on the seat of the Oldsmobile with the handles knotted shut like there was a snake in it.
I untied the knot and held the bag open so Kody could see down into it.
The orange cord, coiled. The black tape, slid sideways. The copper.
Kody looked in the bag a long time. Then he looked at me.
“You said you threw that out.”
“I know what I said.”
At my back the engines ticked as they cooled. Nobody had taken a helmet off but Reuben. The bald one from the feed store was there, third bike from the end, and he lifted two fingers off his handlebar at me like we’d met at church.
Ananya was at the screen door with the dog pressed against her legs. Her aids were in. She had her whiteboard on its shoelace around her neck, and she was looking at the trailer.
Kody set his coffee on the porch rail. He didn’t look at the bikes. He looked at me the way he did at fourteen, when I’d called the parents of a boy he was staying over with.
“Mom,” he said. “What did you do?”
The Custer County Fair
That shaved ice machine is older than Ananya’s father’s driver’s license.
I bought it in 1998 from a Methodist church in Arnold that was getting out of the snow cone business, forty dollars, and I ran a table with it at the Custer County Fair for three summers to pay for Kody’s braces. Grape, cherry, blue raspberry and lime. Same four bottles she had Saturday.
Kody was eight the first summer. He wanted a job, so I gave him the cord.
He’d run it out from the barn to our table every morning, kneel on the end so nobody would trip, and every hour he’d come check it like it was a dog on a chain. “I’ll do the cord, Mom.” I let him because it made him stand up straight.
Somewhere after that he started saying quit hovering. He was fourteen. He’s thirty-one now and he still says it, and I still mostly do what he says, because he’s been on his own with Ananya since Janae moved to Omaha two years ago and he doesn’t have room for one more person telling him how.
Janae took a job and a new husband and every other weekend. She also took a lawyer. There’s a letter from that lawyer on Kody’s refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a tractor, about the custody review in August. He keeps it where he has to see it.
I live eight minutes away. I get Ananya from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I drive her to North Platte for her audiology appointments because Kody can’t get the time off. It’s the best part of my week and I’ve never told him that.
Saturday morning I’d gone into his garage for the card table.
The dog followed me to the door from the kitchen and stopped there. He wouldn’t come down onto the concrete. I called him and he sat.
On the shelf over the dog food there was a yellow extension cord still in its plastic, the receipt taped on the front. I moved it to get the table legs loose and set it back.
At the feed store, before the bikes came, Ananya kept wiping her right hand on her shorts. I figured it was the syrup.
That’s all of it. That’s what I had.
Now Kody was on the porch with his coffee going cold, and fourteen riders were waiting on my answer.
“Ananya,” Kody said. “Inside.”
She didn’t move. He reached past her and pulled the screen door shut.
The back of the feed receipt
It was a receipt for a fifty-pound bag of layer pellets and a salt block. On the back, in carpenter’s pencil, block capitals:
KEEP THE CORD. DON’T LET ANYBODY THROW IT OUT. TEXT ME WHERE HER DAD LIVES.
Then a phone number.
Then, smaller, like he’d thought about it and gone back:
I HAD A BOY. EDWIN. 7. 1991. A TROUBLE LIGHT IN A WET CARPORT.
And his name, just Reuben.
That’s why I read it three times. The first time I read it as a threat. The second time I read the bottom line and put my hand over my mouth like the woman at the pump. The third time I just sat there with the air going and the crossword on the seat.
I took Ananya home with me. I washed the syrup out of her shirt in my sink and she sat at my table and wouldn’t eat her grilled cheese.
She wrote on her whiteboard, MEAN MAN, and held it up at me.
I wrote under it, HE SAW SOMETHING.
She rubbed it out with her sleeve.
Kody came at six to get her. He’d heard already. Broken Bow is a small town and the feed store is the middle of it.
He laughed first. Then he got mad, which with Kody is the order it goes.
“A biker kicked her table over and you just stood there?”
“I didn’t just stand there. I pushed him.”
“He owes her a table. He owes you a machine. I’m calling the sheriff in the morning.” He looked around my kitchen. “Where’s the cord?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s junk, Mom. I’ll toss it.”
I had it in my purse on the chair beside him. I could see the orange through the zipper.
“I threw it in the dumpster at the store,” I said.
He nodded like that settled something. “Good.” Then he put his hand on my shoulder on his way out the door and said, “Quit hovering,” like it was a joke between us.
I sat in the dark at my table until after ten.
Then I took out the receipt and typed his address into a text, and sent it to a man I’d shoved in a parking lot that morning.
He wrote back one thing.
9.
The screen door
“I asked you a question,” Kody said.
“I kept the cord,” I said. “I gave him your address.”
Kody came down two steps. He’s not a big man. He gets his size from his voice.
“You brought a motorcycle club to my house.” He was talking to me but he was looking at Reuben. “Over a piece of tape.”
“Over the copper,” Reuben said.
“It’s outdoor rated.”
“Wasn’t the cord that was outdoor rated. It was the puddle.” Reuben put his gloves in his back pocket. “Where’s it plug in, at home? Garage?”
“That’s none of your business.”
The bald one had his phone out. He wasn’t recording. He was scrolling through the pictures from the feed store, the outlet on the wall with its cover cracked, the scorch on the plate. He turned the screen so I could see it, not Kody.
“She ran that cord off this house, too,” he said to me. “Lemonade, last summer. Your granddaughter told my wife at the store.”
Kody heard that.
“Get off my property,” he said. “All of you. I’ll have a deputy out here in fifteen minutes.”
I went up the steps to him. I thought if I could just get between him and the bikes he’d hear me.
“Kody. Let the man look at the garage outlet. That’s all he wants. Then they’ll go.”
That was the wrong thing. I knew it the second it was out.
He turned on me instead of them.
“You know what Janae’s lawyer does with this? Fourteen bikers in my yard. My own mother telling a stranger I’m a danger to my kid. You know what that looks like in August?”
“I didn’t tell anybody anything.”
“You don’t have to. You brought them.” He set his jaw. “Tuesdays are done. Thursdays too. I’ll get her to North Platte myself.”
I opened my mouth and nothing came.
Reuben didn’t say a word. He was looking past both of us, at the house.
The screen door banged open, and Ananya came down the steps carrying something yellow.
The whiteboard
The dog came behind her as far as the bottom step and stopped there.
She had the yellow cord from the garage shelf in both hands, still in its plastic, the receipt taped across the front. She went right past her father.
She didn’t give it to me either. She walked up to Reuben, the meanest man alive, and held it out to him.
He took it in two hands, the way you take something from a child at church.
Kody said, “Ananya. Put that back.”
She could hear him. Her aids were in. She didn’t put it back.
She let go of her whiteboard, and it swung on its shoelace, and she pulled the cap off her marker with her teeth. She wrote with her tongue out, the way she does. Then she turned the board around and held it up, at me, not at him.
IT BITES. I TOLD DADDY.
Then she wiped her right hand on her shorts.
I’d seen her do it all Saturday morning. I’d seen her do it at the lemonade table last summer and thought she’d spilled.
Kody said, “She says the TV bites. She says the car door bites in the winter. It’s static, bug. I told you, it’s static.”
Ananya wrote again. The marker was squeaking.
THE TABLE LEG.
Reuben turned the clamshell over in his hands and read the receipt taped to the front. He read it the way he’d read the puddle, without hurrying.
“April ninth,” he said.
Nobody said anything.
“When’d the dog get into it?”
Kody looked at the dog. The dog looked at the garage and lay down on the bottom step.
“First week of April,” I said. I knew because Kody had called me that night from the vet in Ansley, and I’d driven out with my checkbook.
Reuben held the yellow cord out to Kody across the bottom step. Kody didn’t take it.
“You bought the fix,” Reuben said, “and kept the receipt.”
Thirty-four dollars
“It was thirty-four dollars.”
Kody said it to the yellow cord, not to any of us. Then he said it again, louder, to the street.
“Thirty-four dollars, okay? I was going to switch it. I had it in the cart, I bought it, I was going to switch it out, and then the vet was four hundred and eleven, and the tape held. The tape held all of May. It held at the lemonade. She sold lemonade for two weekends and nobody got hurt.”
“Nobody stood in a puddle,” Reuben said.
“I was going to take it back if the tape held through the summer. That’s not a crime. That’s thirty-four dollars I didn’t have. You know what her new aids cost? You know what the co-pay is in North Platte? You know what Janae’s lawyer gets an hour?” He pointed the cup at me and coffee went over the rail. “She knows. She knows what my month looks like, and she sat in the Oldsmobile doing the crossword, and now she’s the one who saw it coming.”
“I didn’t see it coming,” I said.
“No. You didn’t.” He was red to the ears. “And she says everything bites. She says my hand bites when it’s cold. You want me to call an electrician every time she says something bites?”
Ananya held her board up again. Same words. She hadn’t wiped them.
Reuben didn’t argue with him. He stood there with his gloves in his back pocket and let Kody run out.
When Kody ran out, I went back down the steps to the Oldsmobile. I took the Walmart bag off the seat and brought it back and set it on the porch rail, next to his coffee.
“Janae’s lawyer can have this,” I said. “Or you plug in the yellow one. You pick.”
He looked at the bag a long time.
“You’d do that.”
“Yes.”
“You’d hand Janae my kid over a cord.”
I didn’t answer that. It wasn’t the question.
He took his pocketknife out of his jeans. He held his hand out to Reuben without looking at him, and Reuben gave him the yellow cord, and Kody cut the plastic open on the porch step in three cuts and pulled the cord out and dropped the shell in the yard.
Then he said it to me, flat, the way you read a bill.
“Tuesdays are still done.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I mean it, Mom.”
“I know.”
The bald one put his phone away. He went to his saddlebag and came back with the pickle jar, washed out, the label gone, the quarters in it. He handed it to Ananya. “Thirty-one,” he said. “I counted twice.”
Reuben went back down the driveway to the trailer. He untied the blue tarp at one corner and pulled.
It was a snow cone stand. Plywood, painted purple, with a counter at her height and a slot for the jar. On the side was a gray box with a red button and a black one.
“Breaker’s built in,” he said. “Water so much as looks at it, it quits.” He found Ananya’s face and slowed down so she could read him. “Every morning you push the black one. If the red one pops, you don’t plug in. You come get your grandma.”
Bittern
It’s three Saturdays later. I’m back at the feed store in the Oldsmobile with the air on.
The stand is between the propane cage and the ice machine. The gravel is dry. The yellow cord runs from the wall to the gray box on the side, and somebody has taped it down to the ground every two feet with silver duct tape, flat, no loose end.
Kody is sitting on an upside-down bucket next to it with his sunglasses on. He hasn’t looked at the Oldsmobile once. He answers my texts with one word, and I haven’t picked her up on a Tuesday since the end of July.
The custody review got moved to September. He hasn’t told me anything else, and I haven’t asked.
Ananya pushed the black button at ten this morning. I saw her do it from here. She pushed it like it was a doorbell.
Around eleven she walks out across the lot with her whiteboard and holds it flat against my windshield.
2 DOLLARS. GRANDMA.
I get out. My sandals stay dry.
I give her two dollars and she puts them in the jar and makes me a blue one, too much syrup, the way I made them for her father at the fair.
Kody doesn’t get up off the bucket. But when she hands it to me he says, without turning his head, “Blue’s still the best one, Mom.”
I take it back to the car and set it on the dash.
Then I pick up my pen and write BITTERN in the seven little boxes.
If you’ve got a cord like that taped up in your garage, go look at it tonight, and maybe send this to whoever taped it.
That wasn’t the only time a biker’s actions left everyone stunned – read about the biker my boss made wait while an old dog shook in his arms and the six numbers punched into a dog tag with my tools. And there’s the caseworker who judged a biker before he even reached the register.
