The Winners Circle Read online

  A laying hen danced on the seat, squawking and flapping.

  “Get it out!” Chelsea said.

  Jerry snatched at the excited bird, swerving to avoid a stand of maple trees atop the hill. He glanced in the mirror. The reporters cruised through the scene snapping pictures of the wreckage.

  The chicken jumped on Chelsea’s back, scratching and pecking. She screamed louder. “Get it off me!”

  Jerry pointed the Ford downhill where the path crossed the creek. He leaned over, extending his palm for the bird. It cocked its head to peck, and he throttled the hen in his fist and chucked it out the window.

  In the mirror, he watched the bird tumble and right itself. He saw Jacob holding his ground up on the crest. He noticed the sedan rolling downhill in pursuit. “They’re still on us.”

  “Of course they are.” Feathers clung to Chelsea’s sweater. Bird droppings dotted the seat. She plucked the feathers with the tips of her fingers, as if handling infectious waste.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I’d follow you too.” She burned, as mad as he’d ever seen her. “They’re waiting to see what you do next.”

  “Watch me.” He hit the brakes, easing into the shallow creek. He knew this trick from years of hunting Jacob’s property. Go fast, and you’re stuck in the mud.

  Water gently slapped the doors of the truck. The sedan gained on them. The truck lifted onto the opposite bank. He crossed his fingers, until the rear tires cleared the water. He paused for a second, preparing the clogged engine for the uphill sprint into the woods.

  He nursed the gas, hedging against an untimely stall. The engine whined as it climbed.

  The pursuing sedan barreled into the creek, shooting water from its fenders, slowing in the door-high current. Its wheels churned up mud and rocks, until the engine let up a bubbling growl and quit.

  The Ford lumbered into the trees. Jerry laughed. “Good deal.” For the first time in weeks, months even, he’d done something useful, beat the odds with his own hands.

  His wife clutched the seat, less perturbed. She pulled herself straight, assuming the cool demeanor of a woman yanked from the abyss of total embarrassment.

  Jerry stuck his head out the window, bending an ear toward the creek below. He didn’t notice Chelsea for a moment. He heard two men splashing and cursing in the shallow water. He cut the wheel into the dogwood forest and disappeared into a burst of white flowers and crescent leaves.

  At the house, Jerry unleashed Cortez. The massive black dog jumped to his legs and charged onto the property. Its hindquarters disappeared through the spent raspberry thickets, which still poked from the soil like withering finger bones.

  Jerry found the old chair in the front room, facing the setting sun. He rested his head against the stained and knotty material and listened to the monotonous gush of running water. Chelsea had gone off to shower and trash her clothes. She didn’t bother going upstairs. She stripped in the foyer and jumped in the utility shower on the ground floor.

  His nerves were shot, his brain fried. He considered waiting a few hours before driving to Jacob’s farm to apologize. He needed to make amends, find a way to repair the car-crashed chicken coop and bruised friendship. But he remembered the money—a trainload of cash heading his way. It still seemed unreal. He’d buy Jacob another coop and all the chickens he wanted.

  Jerry went to the cupboard for a drink. He wasn’t the hard drinking type. Twice he’d gotten drunk and regretted it—at the prom and on the day GM served him notice. His foreman had stuck a letter in his mail slot, lacking the courage to dismiss him face to face. The boys on the line stood Jerry up at the bar, until he wavered in his work boots. It didn’t take long. He had the liver of a five-year-old.

  On the shelf, Jerry found an unopened bottle of scotch. He knew little about the varieties of booze, classifying them as either clear or tan. His father was the drinker. He worked in the steel mills in Pennsylvania, phased out during his prime as well. When the old man died, Chelsea sorted through the pitiful items he left behind—a bucket of beer caps, tins of oysters, decks of souvenir playing cards. She kept the bottle of scotch, which Jerry held in his hand. She said it was the best part of him. She said it had aged better than the old man.

  Jerry broke the seal and took a sniff. It smelled like dad: strong, abrupt, cured in oak barrels for decades. Dad appreciated good scotch, but he never approved of Chelsea. He only got used to her coming around. Jerry knew it was because of the harelip. What other reason? It was just another excuse for them not to speak.

  Ice jingled in an empty tumbler, an echo from Jerry’s childhood. He poured a nice amount and took a mouthful of the nasty liquid. It immediately went to his head, and he returned to the lounge chair facing the sun, hoping for the vivid orange rays to glaze his troubles.

  Jerry studied his overgrown acreage with the collapsing barn and the weathered farmhouse and its curling clapboard. He finished the drink, letting his mind go fully numb. If he squinted his eyes, he viewed the property exactly as Chelsea intended. Every one of her plans took shape in his head. He decided to begin in the morning.

  Chelsea screamed in the bathroom.

  Without a thought, Jerry ran. He found her huddled in the corner of the stall. She faced the wall, soapsuds spinning down the drain by her feet. She was naked and dripping wet.

  A photographer hovered in the window, but as soon as Jerry filled the doorway, the stranger jumped down. Jerry operated on instinct. His one job in this world was protecting Chelsea. He’d busted a boy’s nose in the third grade for poking fun at her lip. He’d thrown another off the high school gym bleachers for the same reason. It was simple. Nobody messed with big Jerry Nearing, therefore nobody picked on Chelsea.

  He sprinted to the front porch. He wore sweatpants and tattered sneakers. The afternoon was chilly, and the sun sank on the horizon in a gorgeous purple and pink sky. Jerry noticed none of this. He was fueled by rage and four fingers of scotch—three and one half fingers too many. He retrieved his rusty pitchfork from the side of the house. My property. My right to defend it.

  A beige sedan parked at the edge of the woods along the driveway. Jerry marched toward it. The tails of his flannel shirt flapped in the breeze. Where was the dog? He glanced around for signs of life, before sinking the pitchfork into the front left tire.

  Chelsea stood on the porch in a towel, her finger curled over her lip. She rarely raised her voice but was screaming for the second time that day. “Are you crazy?”

  Jerry braced his heel against the fender, skewering the car again. The opposite front tire collapsed, hissing air.

  “Stop it!” Chelsea yelled.

  “I am.” He knew women didn’t like the dirty business in life. That’s why they sent men after it, but every time he defended her, she clung to him like a second skin. He knew what she really wanted.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Stop! Just stop!”

  Jerry spotted the reporters behind a hundred year old oak. The sprawling tree shaded the house but stood apart from the forest. The men couldn’t run for cover without being exposed. He yanked the pitchfork free and cut a straight path for the massive tree trunk.

  “No!” Chelsea said. It registered vaguely in his thoughts.

  One photographer stepped into the sun with his hands in the air. He wore a black sweatshirt, camouflage pants, and a baseball cap on backward. He fisted several rolls of film, dropping them on the ground. “Take it all.”

  Jerry gripped the pitchfork. The wooden handle felt warm in his fist.

  “Please.” The second cameraman had a scarred complexion, readymade for hiding and snooping in the dark. His camera lens poked from his midsection like a weapon of his own. “Take what we have.”

  Jerry glared at the intruders, raising the pitchfork like a spear. He was Neptune, ruler king, god of the rolling hills of Hopewell. He needed to thrust his mighty tines into their cameras, dispelling
reporters from his land forever.

  A car horn beeped on the drive. Jerry heard wheels spinning behind him. A black Mercedes raced up and parked shy of the action.

  A short man in a suit came out from behind the wheel. He had black hair and silver sideburns. His chin was large and flat, Abraham Lincoln style, a beard of skin and bone.

  Jerry glanced between the reporters and the new arrival, unsure of where to launch his first attack.

  “Sir?” The stranger paced forward. “I wouldn’t do this.”

  “Why not?” Jerry asked, but the urge to kill dissipated like a static charge. His arms felt drained. He wondered why he’d picked up the pitchfork. It was stupid. He possessed the size and girth to tackle most men with his bare hands.

  The stranger stopped walking. “Do it if you want, but it’d be such a waste.”

  “A waste?”

  “Of your options.”

  Jerry held his ground, struggling for an excuse to back down. What was he doing? He’d toppled the hen house at Jacob’s farm and perforated a reporter’s car tires like cocktail weenies. Just a few hours outside of the hospital, he’d created a mess of things. He suddenly understood the lives of playboys and rock stars. His day was in fact material for The National Inquirer.

  He glanced at the stranger in the double-breasted suit. “Who are you?”

  “Haskell Cogdon.” He presented his business card—a mini work of art with gold trim and a hologram of his face.

  Jerry didn’t take it. “Did Chelsea invite you?”

  “I’m here on your behalf.”

  Jerry lowered the pitchfork. He heard sticks breaking in the woods. Cortez materialized in the undergrowth, tongue wagging. Jerry waited for the dog to reach his side. “There you are.”

  The pure black shepherd nuzzled Jerry’s thigh. The dog’s fur was soaked and matted and smelled of licorice. Cortez licked Jerry’s free hand.

  “Been in the creek?” Jerry patted the dog’s head. “You should be here when I need you.”

  The reporters didn’t budge. The first man reached for the sky, while the second trembled behind the tree, tossing roles of film around like a sprite dispensing lucky charms. He couldn’t possibly have had anything else to give up, but he continued to empty his pockets and tremble. If the oak wasn’t as thick as a Roman column, the tree might have been shaking as well.

  “You know I mean business.” Jerry eyeballed the reporters. “Get the hell off my farm.”

  Nothing created a better threat than a big man with a huge dog and a sharpened pitchfork. The reporters stumbled for their car and turned over the ignition. They evacuated with such urgency that their car seemed to start before they reached it.

  Jerry watched the flopping car tires hit the road. They thumped, spitting an occasional spark as the rims scraped the pavement, but the car plodded along. He waited for it to stumble out of sight.

  The soothing sound of the rustling trees resumed. Cortez panted near his feet. Jerry looked toward the porch. Chelsea stood in a towel, hair dripping wet, one arm clutching her robe to her waist. Her free hand was in Haskell Cogdon’s hand. She giggled in a girlish way. It reminded Jerry of a scene in a Jane Austen novel, too formal, overdone.

  Jerry planted the pitchfork in the cold spring soil. His big toe pushed through the tip of his sneaker. He felt a chill in the air. He ought to run Cogdon off his property too, but he was sliding down the backside of a bad booze high, and the man in the suit appeared harmless. He vowed not to get physical, at least not until sunrise.

  Chelsea giggled again. She didn’t mind the fresh company, and Jerry refused to argue. That was the biggest thing. With all that money, they didn’t need to argue ever again.

  CHAPTER 4

  A New Face

  The money settled in for a few weeks before Jerry and Chelsea drove to a noted plastic surgeon outside of Trenton. Chelsea twisted the Ford’s rearview mirror toward the passenger’s seat. For days, Jerry found her gazing into anything that caught her reflection.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Maybe he can do something.”

  She spun her eyes toward him, without really seeing. “I know he can.”

  He patted her thigh, tempering her lofty expectations. She’d run this collision course with fate before. As a teenager, she crash-landed a dozen times, drunk on fancy talk from bargain-rate plastic surgeons.

  She returned to the mirror. She put her fingers to her face and stretched her cheeks. He watched her create a sleeker mouth—one without the upturn that he adored.

  He’d gotten his first glimpse of Chelsea, when they were both six years of age. She was seated in a convertible car. It flew past his house, as he was wandering through the woods, peeling the bark from the birch trees, daydreaming about life before his mother died. The sound of a stock 350 engine roared closer. Jerry stirred from his thoughts and saw Chelsea tearing down the road in that big black car.

  Her father drove a convertible Cadillac, like the one in which Kennedy was shot. It had a large open passenger compartment—a rolling upholstered living room. Mr. Adams was an airline pilot, who’d fought in Korea. He arrived home at odd hours and took his only child for wild country spins. Chelsea knelt on the seat, grabbing the air rushing above the windshield. Her hair trailed behind like a golden scarf. Jerry thought he heard her laughing.

  The Grolling Egg Farm separated his house from hers. He sometimes glimpsed her from a distance but never up close. She didn’t wander away from home. She didn’t appear in the supermarket or visit the park. She never came to school, not the first year or the second. Jerry wondered if she wasn’t just a girl flying through his imagination, yet she stuck in his mind, like a catchy song lyric, hard to release, hard to keep from playing over and over.

  In third grade, Chelsea Adams showed up at Chesterfield Elementary. Jerry heard her name being called, and as she turned to face the class, her future with the kids was doomed at first sight. She’d just finished the last of several operations to join her cleft palate, and a hideous wire assembly strapped her jaw together. It looked moist and red, a gash across the middle of her face. It wasn’t the least bit pretty, and the class let her know, gawking, speechless. Sometimes, not uttering a word is worse than a quick and brutal slip of the tongue.

  Jerry felt their silent rejection. He knew what it meant to be of no use to people. When his mother had passed away from emphysema, the kids kept their distance from him. He hadn’t meant to scare them. He’d only told them how she died. She was eating strawberries when she became violently ill. She collapsed on the bathroom floor, coughing up blood. He thought it was the strawberries. He should’ve gotten on the phone sooner. Someone—his father, the doctor—needed to know. They called it a tragedy, and his father echoed that thought every day afterward. It was in the way he never really looked Jerry in the eye, the way he swam each night in scotch, bottled himself up along with any decent thought he’d ever had. His father behaved as if he was the only one in the family who had been abandoned.

  In school, Jerry and Chelsea didn’t speak. They formed islands of uncertainty and hurt. The fall season took hold, and the hardwoods of Chesterfield turned golden brown in the fading light. After class, Jerry used the shortcut through the woods, while Chelsea ran ahead of the others in her yellow dress with the pink flowers. She never talked to anyone. With all that equipment, Jerry wasn’t sure if she could utter a word.

  It was late October, and plump orange caterpillars clung to the branches and fading foliage. Dried leaves rustled beneath their feet, and the stream rambled over the stones and fallen logs, the dialogue of the forest. Jerry stuck to the path, heading for the large cement drainage pipe that fed the stream. He heard the boys up ahead. Their voices bounced off the water and echoed through the tunnel.

  Chelsea stood on the path, staring at the ground. Her knapsack lay in the yellow grass beside her feet.

  Peter Kruk and his two pals formed a barricade.

  “What’s wrong with your face
, freak?” Kruk displayed the tight veneer of a kid who’d been whipped too many times by his old man. His jaw jutted forward, and his hands constantly balled into fists. He even wrote with his fingers clenched around a pencil, ready to poke someone that got too close.

  Chelsea tried to pass, but Kruk threw his elbow to block her.

  “Freak.” Kruk laughed, joined by his simpering cronies.

  She reached down for her knapsack.

  Kruk stamped on the shoulder strap to keep it down. “Where you goin’?”

  Jerry ducked into the flagging stalks of dried rushes, waiting for the kids to break up. He was curious too. He wanted a peek at the girl. She excelled at keeping out of people’s faces.

  She covered her mouth with her hand. Her hair was fastened into a ponytail that curled upon the nape of her neck.

  “Can’t you speak?” Kruk spit on Chelsea’s legs. He was a spitter too, destined for life as a man whom people sidestepped.

  Kruk pushed her again, fishing for a reaction to toss in her face. “Speak!”

  Jerry heard Chelsea crying. She sobbed, so quietly it hardly rose above the din of the stream. Water swished through the cement tunnel and over a fallen tree. One of the boys plunked stones to the bottom, but Chelsea’s whimper wove through it all, penetrating Jerry’s ears.

  Kruk saw Jerry approaching. “It’s the goon.”

  The insult fell short of wounding Jerry. Kruk said it so many times a day that it was almost funny. Jerry stomped forward. He was taller than the other boys, but he never imagined that he’d silence Kruk until just then.

  “The goon and the freak,” Kruk barked. “It’s an early Halloween party.”

  Jerry scooped up a stone from the path. The smooth rock tucked into his palm, as if cut to fit. He cocked his arm, taking dead aim on Kruk and his filthy little mouth.

  “What you gonna’ do?” Kruk puckered to spit.