She leaned out, both hands clasped on the halfway-open window. Her urgency lit my nerves like a sparkler. “Well, of
course
something’s wrong,
Jenilee
,” she sneered, then looked over my shoulder as Caleb stopped behind me. “Caleb, is the sheriff back yet?”
Caleb glanced at me and shrugged his shoulders, so I answered the question. “No. The last I heard, he went down to the rescue center at the lake. Can I help . . .”
Can I help you?
What a stupid question. Of course not.
She rolled her eyes and slung her head sideways, causing her helmet of fluffy gray hair to bounce up, then settle into place again. “Well,
not
unless
you
have a way to get a fifty-gallon barrel off a
bull’s head
.” She turned to Caleb again, talking to him instead of me. “I was just on my way down to the rescue station at the lake—I was needed there, you see—and just as I came onto farm road Nine-thirty-five, right there in the road, there was a . . . oh . . .
ga-ra-cious!
There it is!” She pointed far down Main Street.
Caleb and I turned to look as a massive Charolais bull crashed through the remains of the pharmacy on the edge of town.
“What the . . . ?” Caleb muttered. “It’s got a barrel stuck on its head.”
Dr. Albright stepped out of the armory and walked down the steps, scowling as he approached the car. “Is something wrong out here? I heard a car horn.”
I shaded my eyes, trying to get a better look at the big white bull as it crashed through town, its head and neck wedged inside a crushed fifty-gallon metal barrel. “How in the world . . . ?”
Mazelle leaned farther out the window, pointing down the hill, waving her finger. “That thing rammed right into my car on the county road! I’m lucky to be alive. It knocked me right into the guardrail of the bridge.” She adjusted her glasses and peered at Dr. Albright, waving her finger at the dented fender and broken headlight on her car. “Call the sheriff. Tell him to bring a
rifle
. That
creature
is liable to kill someone! I’m lucky to be alive.”
Dr. Albright glanced down the hill, but the bull had disappeared into what remained of the old sale barn. The muted sound of crashing and bellowing testified to the fact that he was still inside.
“Hurry, now!” Mazelle screeched. “They can get him while he’s still trapped inside.”
Dr. Albright shrugged, still confused about what was going on. “I’ll go call the sheriff on the radio.”
“No!” I heard myself say. “No. Don’t call the sheriff. That’s Mr. Jaans’s old bull, Charlie. He’s a big pet. He’s just scared.”
“I’m sure the sheriff can handle it.”
“We can’t take a chance on someone shooting him. He’s a pet,” I insisted.
“He’s a
menace
!” Mazelle waved her hand wildly out the window. “Call the sheriff!”
Dr. Albright shifted from one foot to the other. “We can’t have a dangerous animal on the loose. We have a whole field full of injured people down there. What we
don’t
need are any more injuries.”
“
Ex-actly
,” Mrs. Sibley chimed in. “We don’t need any more injuries.” She climbed from the car and slammed the door. “For heaven’s sake, I’ll go in and call the sheriff
my-self
. This is a dangerous situation. Lord. I think I have
whiplash
.” She disappeared through the armory door, screaming, “June, that worthless bull of yours is crashing through town like a wild animal.”
“No one is shooting that bull!” I hollered after her, then wondered whose voice that was. I had never, ever in my life raised my voice to anyone that way before, especially not to Mrs. Sibley.
Dr. Albright glanced from me to the building and back, trying to decide what to do.
Caleb pointed down the hill. “Oh, shoot, here comes the sheriff. Someone else must have called him.”
The sheriff’s car skidded into the parking lot between the vet clinic and the sale barn. “Oh, no!” I gasped, and started running down the hill. Caleb followed, passing me before I reached the ditch.
As I crossed the road, the sheriff and his deputy started banging on the pipe fence, trying to keep Charlie from charging. The bull was trapped in the corner of one of the sale pens, pawing mud into the air and slinging his head and the barrel into the pipe fence.
“Don’t shoot him!” I hollered, sliding to a halt beside Caleb.
The sheriff glanced over his shoulder at me. “I ain’t sure what we’re gonna do. Darnedest thing I ever seen. Don’t know how in the world that bull got that bent-up barrel stuck on his head, but one thing’s for sure: We can’t let him get out of here, and we can’t go in there with him. He’s likely to kill somebody. There isn’t a corral here that’s still in one piece to lock him up in, either.”
“Guess we could try to rope him or somethin’,” the deputy suggested.
“Well, what in the world you gonna rope, Tom?” the sheriff scoffed, banging his nightstick against the iron fence to keep the bull from charging. “His horns are
inside
the
barrel
.”
“Well, I don’t know. That’s a problem. Guess we could—”
An idea came to me. “Wait, just keep him there for a minute.” I hurried across the parking lot to what remained of the vet clinic, partially tumbled cement-block walls with the roof ripped off.
“Jenilee, what are you doing?” I heard Caleb call after me as I squeezed through the metal door, which was hanging ajar.
“Getting some . . . ouch . . . tranquilizers,” I called back, scrambling across the debris toward Doc’s medicine room. “Doc keeps all of that in the old refrigerator.” I climbed through another collapsed doorway into the back room. The refrigerator was lying on its side with the door hanging open. Bottles of livestock medicine were everywhere, some shattered, some intact. I searched through them until I found a vial of Acepromozine and a syringe. One of Doc’s vet kits lay nearby. I grabbed it and headed through the debris again.
“I found it,” I said, shoving the vet kit out the door. “Here.”
Caleb took the box and helped me through the door. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to tranquilize him.” I took out a syringe and pulled a dose of Ace, then squirted a little from the tip to remove the air bubble.
“You’re gonna what?” Caleb looked doubtfully at the syringe as he followed me toward the corral. “You going to throw that at him or something? Because you can’t get in there with him. He’s ramming those fences at a hundred miles an hour.”
The sheriff reached out and caught my arm just as I was going to squeeze past his deputy into the corral. “What are you gonna do with that?”
“Tranquilize the bull,” I replied, determined to go through with my plan.
“How the heck you gonna do that?” The sheriff stopped banging on the fence and looked at me as if I had gone completely out of my mind. “Minute he hears you in there, he’s gonna charge.”
“I’ll be quiet,” I said, jerking away.
“This ain’t an episode of
Wild Kingdom,
Jenilee Lane. He’ll charge as soon as you stick him with that needle.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“You ain’t gonna be able to do that.”
“Watch me,” I shot back. The sheriff just stood back and gaped.
I moved slowly across the corral, thinking,
This ain’t an episode of
Wild Kingdom. Holding the syringe ahead of me, I moved one careful step at a time through the mud as Charlie slung his head and rammed the fences with the fervor of an animal gone mad from hunger, thirst, and fear.
My heart stopped in my chest as I inched closer and felt the heat of the bull’s body, smelled the scent of sweat and dirt. I heard the rattle of his breath as he paused for a moment, and then the deafening collision of metal against metal as he charged the fence again. I waited for him to stagger to his feet and pause again; then I rushed forward the last few steps, stabbed him in the flank with the syringe, squeezed the plunger, and jumped out of the way with the needle still hanging loosely in Charlie’s skin.
The bull bellowed, wheeled around, and charged toward the men, who scattered across the parking lot with Charlie roaring behind them.
The sheriff, beer belly and all, shinnied up the trunk of a tree with the grace of an acrobat. Charlie rammed the tree, then stumbled unsteadily backward as the tranquilizer began to take effect. In slow motion, he took another run at the tree, stumbled back, charged again, then fell to his knees and lay down, panting inside the barrel.
Ashen-faced, the sheriff climbed down from the tree. “If I told that story, no one would believe it. Come on, boys, let’s see if we can get this thing off him. Maybe if we twist it around some and pull, his head might slide on out.”
I moved forward and tried to help guide the barrel off the bull’s neck as the men pulled. Slowly, inch by inch, the barrel worked loose until finally Charlie’s head, bloodied and bruised, tumbled free. He laid his massive head on the ground and sighed, as if he knew his misadventure was finally over.
Caleb squatted down and rubbed the curly tuft of hair between Charlie’s ears. “Poor fella. Been one heck of a day, hasn’t it?”
Charlie rolled his eyes drunkenly at the sound of Caleb’s voice, then pulled in a huge breath and let out a long snort, clearing his nose on Caleb’s jeans.
“Yuck!” Caleb looked at me and curled his lip. I laughed, and everyone else laughed with me.
“I guess we can take it from here,” the sheriff said finally. “We’ll get some ropes on him before he wakes up.”
I stood up and retrieved the vet box. “Be careful what you do with him. He’s an escape artist. He gets loose from the Jaans place every time there’s a storm.” Kneeling down beside old Charlie, I stroked his bloodied coat. “I’m going to go ahead and suture this cut where the barrel was on his neck and give him a shot of penicillin. It’ll be easier to do it before he wakes up.” I pulled out a suturing packet. No one argued about whether I was capable of doing it or not. They just watched me clean Charlie’s wound and put in an even row of stitches, then give him a dose of intramuscular penicillin just before he started to come back to life.
Caleb cleaned up the supplies and closed the vet box hastily. “Well, no wonder you were so good at dissecting frogs in science class,” he joked as we started up the hill. “I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”
None of you knew anything about me,
I thought, but I said, “Caleb, I worked for Doc Howard almost all the way through high school. Until I took the job writing invoices at Bell’s Construction Company, that is.”
“Yeah, I guess you did. I just never pictured you as the bull-wrestling type.” He cracked a wry smile.
I smiled back. “Well, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” The wrong thing to say. It opened up too many doors to too many subjects.
“I guess that’s true.” He looked away, toward the armory. “You still dating Shad Bell?”
I tried to decide how to answer, wondering why he would ask about Shad and me. I pretended to focus on my footing as we crossed the ditch. “Shad’s been gone out of town ever since”
—since he got caught selling drugs, and his daddy sent him to Wyoming to get him out of the state—
“since he went to Wyoming to work on his uncle’s ranch. We’ve only seen each other a couple of times since he moved back to Poetry last month.” That wasn’t exactly true. I saw Shad every day at work in the construction company office. He wanted things to be the way they used to be when we were dating in high school, and I wasn’t sure they could be.
“Why?” I asked Caleb.
“Well, I just figured, with you working for his daddy . . .” He paused, as if there were something else he didn’t want to say, then finished with, “I just saw his truck pulling into the armory. I thought maybe Shad was here to give you a ride home.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I wanted to make sure I had a chance to tell you . . . well, thanks . . . before you left.”
You’re welcome, Caleb. You’re really welcome
. “You don’t have to say thanks. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay here, in case word comes about my father or my brothers.”
The rumble of an engine rattled the late-afternoon stillness on the hill above us. I knew the sound even before we crested the hill and the truck came into view—red Dodge four-by-four, custom paint job, glass packs on the pipes. Shad’s truck.
Caleb paused at the corner of the parking lot. “I’m going down and get something to eat at the motor home. You want to come along? Cold chili and dry corn bread ought to taste good after a full day of bull wrestling.” He gave Shad’s truck a narrow look. I couldn’t blame him. Shad was one of those kids who’d liked to pick on Caleb back in school.
“No. I want to see if Shad has news about Daddy or my brothers. They might have contacted the construction office, looking for me.”
Caleb paused a moment longer unsure.
“You go ahead,” I said, starting toward Shad’s truck.
“I’ll be just down the hill.”
He turned and walked off, and I hurried to Shad’s truck, hoping he would have news. On the heels of that thought came apprehension, murky and black, a sense of something bad about to happen.
Shad jumped out before the engine quit shuddering. “Where have
you
been?”
“What?” I stepped back, a habit from a past with him that didn’t seem so long ago now. He was already acting jealous and possessive, the way he used to when we were together back in high school.
He stopped about two feet away and threw his hands in the air. “I been lookin’ all over the woods by your house, thinkin’ something happened, that maybe you was outside when the tornado come through, and you was layin’ in the woods dead. Where’s Nate and your daddy?”
Tears pressed into my eyes, because I realized he didn’t have any news. I swallowed hard. Shad hated it when I cried. “They never came back from the sale in Kansas City yesterday.”
Was it just yesterday?
“Nobody has heard anything about them at all. I thought maybe you were coming with news.”