Crazy Little Thing III
*
Come out, Virginia, don’t let me wait,
You Catholic girls start much too late.
Sooner or later it comes down to fate;
I might as well be the one:
You know that only the good die young.
- Only the Good Die Young, Billy Joel
*
[Connor]
She didn’t speak for the first half hour. I thought about making a little conversation, but she looked too pissed to even attempt civility, so I shrugged and focused on the road.
Later, though, she started releasing loud, irritated-sounding sighs. I ignored her through the first four, but on the fifth sigh, glanced over at her in the front seat.
I almost laughed aloud. Shoulders hunched, arms crossed tightly across her stomach, left leg crossed over the right, Jo was pressing herself against the window, trying to put as much space as possible between my body and hers.
She caught me glancing from the road to her, then back to the road for a second, then back to her again.
“What?”
“You look very comfortable.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Connor.”
One side of my mouth quirked up. “Just saying.”
“Just drive.”
I shrugged. “Suits me.”
She released another longsuffering sigh, and I decided I was letting her off way too easy.
“So are you gonna tell me what that was in the parking lot or what?” I asked.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jo said. She sounded completely convincing, but the blush that colored her cheeks gave her away.
“Sure you do. So c’mon. No more bullshit. What was that? Too much time sitting in calc class with your legs crossed? Prepping for a hot date?”
She snorted. “Right. Sure.”
“Just guessing. I don’t really have anything to go off of here.”
“Well, it’s…it’s none of your business!”
“You want to walk to Jefferson?” I asked, raising my brows at her.
“Watch the road,” she snapped.
“I’ll watch the road if you answer the question,” I said.
She tossed her head to the side and seemed to disappear even further into the depths of her stubbornly crossed arms.
“Deal?” I asked.
Her head flipped back to me. “For heaven’s sake—will you please just watch the road?”
I shrugged and faced forward again. “All right, keep your little secret to yourself. You’ll be begging to tell me before this weekend is over.”
Jo snorted and shifted in her seat, angling her body away from me. “We’ll just see about that.”
**
I really felt like I had the upper hand for the rest of the ride. But as soon as we passed the “Welcome to Jefferson!” sign, cheerful in all its paint-peeling glory, I had the sinking sense that I was way out of my depth.
White tents lined the streets of the small town. Just feet from a bright red pick-up truck was a row of bored-looking horses tethered to some trees, munching the grass around their hooves. As we passed over a bridge, I saw an apron-clad woman hauling a bucket of water out of the river. Two small children in matching gingham outfits chased each other on the riverbank, then followed the woman as she called to them and started up the hill toward the tents.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I glanced over at Jo, then quickly returned to examining my surroundings. “What?”
“You look…well, I’m not exactly sure what to call your expression, but ‘horrified’ is a good start.”
I tried to look unconcerned. “Sorry,” I said dryly. “I just didn’t realize I drove a Delorian.”
Jo rolled her eyes. “Oh, ha ha,” she said.
“Seriously, though,” I said. “This shit is ridiculous.”
“Oh, that’s another thing,” Jo said, pulling out her cell phone. “Don’t swear this weekend.”
I laughed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that.”
She stopped typing on her phone and looked sideways at me, eyebrows raised. “Connor. I’m serious. There are a lot of little kids running around the camp. It’s just not appropriate.”
She wasn’t kidding. I tried to get my head around the idea of not swearing for forty-eight hours and promptly failed.
“So—wait—“ I shifted in my seat, peering over my steering wheel. “You’re telling me that guys like that never swear at these things.”
A man with an uneven, salt-and-pepper beard and an impressive gut had hooked his thumbs into the straps of his overalls and spit an impressive amount of chewing tobacco onto the sidewalk as we drove past.
“I don’t care what they do,” Jo said. “But I’m telling you—if you drop the f-bomb around those kids, you’ll be ostracized in an instant, and whatever it was you were trying to do by coming to this thing will be ruined.”
We had a brief stare down, interrupted intermittently by my glancing back and forth at the road, until I decided it wasn’t worth the argument. I shrugged.
“All right.”
“All right?” she repeated, her voice rife with skepticism.
“Yeah,” I said. “All right.”
There was a pause.
I grinned and glanced over. “It’s gonna be so funny when I piss you off enough that you’re the one dropping f-bombs in front of the kids.”
Exasperated, she shifted in her seat in that awkward, uncomfortable way she had been the entire trip. “Shut up, Connor,” she said. “And turn in here.”
[Jo]
I kept waiting for him to mess up after we parked his car and began to pull out our bags.
I wanted him to say the wrong thing when Mr. Dyme, our group leader, spotted us and greeted us with his usual boisterous remarks and excessively tight hugs. I wanted the little boys who darted over to ambush us with their wooden rifles to attack him viciously, beating his kneecaps with all their miniscule might. I wanted Loren and Sarah’s greeting to be lukewarm and indifferent. I hoped that Josh, Brad’s brother, would take one look at him and decide he wasn’t worth speaking to all weekend. I wanted him to trip and fall into the pile of horse dung I had narrowly avoided moments before.
I was disappointed on all counts.
Actually, I was more than disappointed; I was mystified. They all seemed to genuinely like him, and infuriatingly, he had yet to give them cause to dislike him.
I left him with Brad and Josh and went to join Loren and Sarah in the wall tent the three of us shared.
“How was the drive?” Loren asked as soon as we were inside.
“Super,” I said, dropping my bag at the foot of my still-collapsed cot.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He was speeding half the time,” I said, “so we got here pretty quickly.”
“Jo,” she moaned, “Come on. I’m dying here.” She flopped onto her cot and dropped her face into her arms. She said something that sounded roughly like, “I need demons.”
I squatted down and picked up my cot. “What?”
Loren flung her head upright. “I need details. Details, Jo! What did he say? What did you listen to? What did you talk about? What happened?”
I tugged the ends of the cot apart and shrugged. “I don’t know. We left. He drove. I sat. We arrived. Now here we are.”
Loren gave a loud groan of frustration. “Jo, I’m serious.”
“So am I. It really wasn’t that interesting.” I tugged harder at my cot, which had decided to stick at one of the joints.
“Well, I’m interested,” Loren said. “So spill.”
“How about you help me first,” I replied. “And I’ll think about it.”
Loren jerked into a sitting position. “So something did happen!” she cried, triumphant.
“No,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t need help setting up this stupid cot.”
“Ask Connor to help you,” Sarah suggested without even a hint of a smile.
“Oh, you are hilarious,” I said, finally wrenching apart the two sides.
She smiled, all innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not,” I muttered. I stood and kicked the last stubborn part of my cot into submission, then dropped my bag on top of it. I opened it and stuck one hand inside to rummage for bug spray. After a moment, I stopped and turned to find Loren and Sarah seated on their respective cots, watching me expectantly.
“Oh, enough!” I snapped, and abandoning my search for the bug spray, forced my way out of the tangled canvas entrance to the tent to find someone to talk to who wasn’t fixated on hearing about Connor Stone’s every cough, inhalation, or sneeze.
[Connor]
“This here’s Smoky. And this one’s Thunderbolt. And that third one there is Gypsy. She gets testy.”
I had somehow lost track of Jo and found myself standing with an older man sporting the biggest, whitest mustache I’d ever seen. We were about fifteen feet away from a row of horses that had been tethered to a rope strung between two pine trees, but only about two feet away from a fresh pile of dung. I could only assume another horse had been recently relocated.
“So you say the boy needs a horse for the battle tomorrow, Josh?” asked the mustache man.
“Yessir.”
Josh Camby, Brad’s younger brother, was in eighth grade, and apparently attended St. Augustine’s with us. Could have fooled me—I would have sworn I’d never seen the kid in my life. He was wearing tan trousers and a plaid shirt tucked in way too tightly, using a frayed piece of rope for a belt. Brad was kind of skinny, but his brother was a toothpick. His pants sagged around his narrow hips and threatened to slip off his slight frame at any moment, regardless of his poorly constructed belt. Brad was generally kind of average-looking—normal height, normal brown hair, kind of boring face—but Josh was the goofy-looking version of his older brother. They had the same boring face, but Josh had a slight overbite and his eyes bugged out when you called his name.
He had found me standing uselessly beside my car after all the meet and greeting had finally stopped and Jo had disappeared.
“Whatchoo doin’?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I responded.
“Got you a ride for the battle tomorrow?” he asked.
I had literally no idea what he was talking about. I kind of half-grinned and tapped the side of my car with my knuckles.
The kid guffawed. “Come on, I’ll help you. I’m Brad’s brother. They told me you was coming.”
And now I was stuck with mustache man and a pile of poop, shopping for a horse I definitely did not want.
“Well, let’s think…” The old guy hooked his gnarled, old thumbs into his belt loops and gave the front of his suspenders a smart pop with his forefingers. “Cain’t ride him. Cain’t ride him. Sure as hell cain’t ride Gypsy—she’d throw you in about a blink and a half—so I guess…” He shrugged and looked at Josh. “What do you think?”
“You’re the expert,” Josh said.
“Lola, then,” the old guy said.
Josh gave another one of those goofy-sounding laughs that was part guffaw, part snort, and part wheeze, and slapped himself on his stick-thin leg.
“What?” I asked, looking between the two. A crooked grin had appeared beneath the mass of white mustache, and I didn’t like the way they were eyeing me at all.
“You ridden before?” Josh asked.
“A little.”
“Look like you been outta the saddle for a spell,” the old guy said.
“Kinda.” I hadn’t been on a horse in years.
“Shoot, it’s easy!” Josh exclaimed, slapping me on the shoulder. “We’ll have you ready to go in no time.”
“Where’s Lola?” the mustache guy asked.
“Brad took her down to water her. Down by the river somewhere.”
“Ah, well. Don’t worry, son, you’ll meet her in the morning.”
“Super,” I said. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and followed Josh and the gnarly-looking mustache dude back to the neat rows of white tents.
Toward the center on one side was a large canvas tarp attached to one of the bigger tents. “It’s called a wall tent,” Jo had explained. “They’re for officers and stuff. The little ones are for the regular soldiers. They’re called A-frames.”
“Which one do I get?”
“Neither. The boys always sleep out under the tarp. That’s what all that hay is for.” She had looked way too pleased with herself. Sleeping under a tarp on top of a bunch of hay on the dirt. People did this recreationally?
Now she was with Brad and Sarah, trying to start a fire.
“Just use the lighter fluid, Brad,” Sarah said, looking exasperated.
Brad shook his head. “No way.” Squatting even closer to the wood, he struck harder at the flint and steel in his hands, but no spark appeared.
“Come on,” Sarah said, prodding him in the shoulder. “We’re going to be at this all night.”
Brad pulled his hands away from the unlit fire pit and rested his forearms on his legs. “Dude, Sarah. Not appreciating the doubt here.”
“Friday night is always marshmallow night.”
“You’ll get your stupid marshmallows.”
“Yeah, but at this rate it’ll probably be Saturday morning instead.”
“Come on, Brad,” Jo chimed in, holding out the container of lighter fluid. She wiggled it back and forth and it sloshed around inside. “Just a little squirt.”
“Girl Scout juice,” he scoffed. “We don’t need it.”
“That stuff is for sissies,” Josh confirmed, and the trio turned, apparently noticing us for the first time. Mustache dude had wandered off somewhere else, leaving the teenagers to fend for themselves. Brad taking a year to start the fire was obviously some kind of tradition with them.
“Connor—glad you made it,” Brad said.
“Good trip?” Sarah asked.
“The best,” Jo muttered.
“We got new boy here all good to go for the battle tomorrow,” Josh announced, tugging at his rope belt.
“Yeah?” Brad had gone back to striking frantically without any results.
“Yep. He’s gonna ride Lola.”
Jo raised her brows, looking like she was holding back a smile. “Really?”
“Yeah, so what?” I said. “What’s the big deal about this Lola horse anyway?”
“Nothing,” Jo said. Her face split in a huge grin. “You’ll love her, Connor.”
“Aha!” Brad gave a triumphant cry as the paper he had crumpled beneath the pile of logs burst into flame.
“Finally,” Sarah said.
“I think that was faster than last year,” Jo said, plopping down on a collapsible stool near the fire. Brad looked proud.
Sarah checked her watch. “Ooh, no, sorry. Two and a half minutes slower. You’re losing your touch. Pass the marshmallows.”
Brad blew on the fire. “Damn it.”
Josh kicked a twig toward the stack of logs, but inadvertently sent some dirt flying too. Part of the fire went out.
“Dude!” Brad punched at him, but Josh darted out of the way in time and wandered off chuckling to himself. Brad carefully added more fuel to the fire in strategic locations, and it grew quickly. I was actually sort of impressed. I’d never seen anybody start a fire from scratch like that—no lighter, no matches, no nothing. Who knew Brad was such a Boy Scout?
“Wait.” Sarah looked up from where she was spearing a marshmallow onto a stick. The growing flickers of firelight illuminated her frown. “Connor’s riding Lola in the battle tomorrow? Jo, that’s—“
“A great idea,” Jo said, a smile blooming on her face. “A really, really great idea. I can’t wait.”
**
Lola wasn’t a horse.
“A donkey? Jo—come on—seriously?”
Jo couldn’t stop smiling as she handed me a heavy Colt pistol. “Here. Holster this. Sarah and Loren and I already loaded it so you’re good to go. Don’t forget that it’s real black powder so—“
“Yeah, check, got the safety brief six times already. No bullets, but still a real gun with real black powder than makes real people real dead.”
Jo gave a half-pout that I found strangely attractive. Made her look less like she had a book up her ass.
“Damn,” she said. “Looks like you might make it out of this thing alive after all.”
“Whatever.” I snapped the holster over the pistol and glanced at the sturdy, dun-colored donkey. It blinked its docile eyes at me and turned its head away, looking bored. “Just run this whole battle thing by me one more time.”
“It’s not that complicated.”
“Jo,” I said with mock seriousness. “This is for my safety. Also the enjoyment of the spectators.”
I still couldn’t understand why the population of Jefferson had apparently doubled overnight; people now filled the streets to buy souvenirs from the tents set up by the reenactors, and were beginning to line up along the broad, grassy field where we were supposed to fight our battle this afternoon. It was a Saturday for Christ’s sake—didn’t these people have anything better to do?
“Fine,” Jo said. “Yankees win today, Confederates win tomorrow.”
“How’d they decide that again?”
“Coin toss. There wasn’t an actual battle in Jefferson, so they just make up a different scenario every year.”
I laughed.
Jo actually smiled too—she even looked kind of sheepish. “Okay, so it’s stupid. Just don’t get a weird hero complex and go charging into the Yankee ranks.”
I plucked at the gray, woolen jacket Brad had lent me that morning. “Still can’t believe you made me dress like a slave owner from the boonies.”
“Oh grow up, Connor,” Jo said, and flounced off, yellow paisley floating in her wake.
I watched her for a moment, still not quite accustomed to the change in her appearance. She was all business when we were at school, just a demon in plaid darting from class to class. But now she seemed softer, somehow. She wore her hair in braids pinned close to her head, and her cheeks were pink from cooking breakfast over the fire—yeah, they’d actually cooked breakfast over a fire. And Jo, Miss “it’s an abomination that the 19th Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1920,” actually helped. I had watched, mystified, as she cracked eggs over a cast iron pot on top of a crackling fire, then went to search for the salt and pepper.
One of the little kids in the group had stuck a daisy in her braids, and its white petals flopped precariously against her dark plaits as she walked away.
She smiled more out here too, when she was playing with little kids and joking with her friends. That was really it, I decided. The smile was what made the difference.
I turned back to the donkey, which looked about as skeptical as I felt.
“Well, Lola, I guess it’s just you and me. Ready to kill some abolitionists?”
The donkey snorted and pawed at the ground.
Here goes nothing.
[Jo]
Everything seemed fine when they rode out onto the field.
“Where is he?” Loren asked, tugging at my arm nervously. “They didn’t leave him behind, did they? I told Brad to watch out for him. Of course he was all, ‘dur dee dur, Josh is watching him,’ but seriously—when was the last time Josh did something right?”
“Loren.”
“Oh come on, Jo, all that kid is interested in is guns and horses. He walks around at school with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth half the time. He belongs in a barn.”
“Loren.”
“And Connor looks so hot in his uniform. Like, seriously, I was totally pushing for him to go Union today because he looks so good in the navy blue blazer at school—I mean, part of that is just how broad his shoulders are, but the blue is definitely great with his coloring—but ohmigod does that gray look good on him.”
“Loren.”
She laughed and twirled one of her blonde curls around her finger—Loren always let a few tendrils fall strategically from her pins. “Jo, you are totally blushing. This is so cute. I’m so glad Connor came—oh! There he is!”
In that moment, I was glad Connor had followed me to a reenactment, planning to make my life hell. Because Connor didn’t look smug or assured or cocky at all. Following Josh and Brad on their much larger horses was Connor on a squat donkey, looking desperately uncomfortable. He leaned forward in the saddle, his grey kepi pulled low over his eyes, as if he just hunched forward far enough and he’d disappear.
Sarah, watching patiently from my other side as Loren jumped around and giggled and preened, saw what I saw at the same moment, and we both burst out laughing.
“What?” Loren asked. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sarah agreed, still giggling. “Just a thing from calc class.”
“Creeper,” I snorted.
“Got what was coming to him,” Sarah said, and we both dissolved into a fresh round of giggles.
The Union cannons fired a round. Connor looked startled, and sort of like he wanted to ride in the other direction, but the men around him picked up to a canter. Afraid to be left behind, he kicked Lola’s sides. She continued moving at the same bored trot.
I had a small wicker basket hanging off my arm—well, my free arm; Loren was hanging on the other one—and reached inside. My hand bumped a lace fan, a handkerchief, lip balm, and sunscreen before my fingers closed around my camera. I pulled it out and zoomed in close. Just a quick picture for posterity: the moment when Connor Stone rode a goofy-looking donkey while wearing a Confederate soldier’s uniform and looked nervous as hell.
Just as I had framed the shot, however, Connor disappeared. I frowned and looked up from the camera screen. Loren gave a short, shrill scream and yanked on my arm so hard I almost dropped my camera.
I actually felt a momentary flash of panic when Connor fell off the donkey—I could only imagine what sort of lawsuit his parents would dig up if he came home with so much as a scratch on him. I planned to hang back and let his new admirers “mourn” for him, but Loren and Sarah snatched my basket and my camera out of my hands and shoved me toward the battlefield.
“Go, Jo—hurry!” Loren squealed. “Before he gets up—go, go!”
I ran without thinking, boots lost in the high grass that tickled my calves when it slipped beneath my pantaloons. I dropped to my knees when I reached him. He was lying on his stomach, unmoving. Lola, looking unconcerned, began to graze near his leg.
I rolled him cautiously onto his back.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
A cannon exploded a few yards away, and white dust floated over us. I was used to the feeling of being lost in an unexplainable, bright fog, and the strange, smoky smell of the black powder, but Connor wasn’t, and began to cough.
“Connor,” I repeated, more insistently, poking him in the shoulder.
He groaned and turned his head to the side.
I grasped his chin and leaned down. “Connor,” I said. “Are—you—all—right?”
He lifted his head slightly, and our noses bumped. My eyes crossed. I heard his low chuckle. “Huh. Worked.”
“Oh!” I shoved his face away from me and smacked my hand on his chest, pushing against it to help me stand, but he caught my hand and looked up at me with innocent eyes.
“Come on, bookworm…” He coughed. “Don’t ruin it for the spectators.”
Mentally, I flung his hand away, stood up, and kicked him in the ribs before sprinting off the battlefield, abandoning him in the dirt and horse dung while his noble steed munched the grass beside him.
Instead, I made a face and squatted beside him. “Just shut up.”
“Are you supposed to nurse me now?” he asked with a grin. “Comfort me in my dying moments? Do I get a final request?”
“Stop being such an ass. I’m trying to decide what to do.” I squinted back at where Loren stood, trying to judge the distance.
“Save me, obviously,” Connor said, picking at the grass with one hand.
I couldn’t leave him there. It was his first time out, so he had no sense of where to fall on a battlefield to wait it out. He had actually chosen to fall right where I knew the Confederate cavalry was going to retreat. He’d be right in the way.
The idea of Connor getting the wits scared out of him by a horde of retreating guys in gray on horseback wasn’t exactly repugnant to me, but since we’d ridden together, everyone had apparently decided that I was responsible for him, and if he was trampled on the battlefield, I’d be the first one they’d blame.
“Fine,” I said, to no one in particular, and whipped out a pre-bloodied bandage. “Hold still,” I told Connor, and wrapped it around his head. I tied it slightly too tightly, feeling satisfied when I saw him wince. With the final wrap I covered one of his eyes.
“Hey—“ he protested.
“Leave it,” I said. “You’re injured, remember? Okay, now you have to get up.”
“But I’m injured. You just said so.”
“I didn’t tie the bandage around your leg, you idiot.”
“Head injuries are way worse.”
“Just get up, Connor.”
He plucked a piece of grass out of the dirt and tossed it aside. “No can do. I’m staying right here with Lola until I have a leg injury.”
It wasn’t even worth the argument. I pulled out another bloodied bandage and fastened it—slightly too tightly once more—just above his knee. “Now let’s go,” I said.
“You should touch my cheek and say comforting things to me. They’d eat it up.” He jerked his head in the direction of the crowd, which had migrated toward our little show. The battle hadn’t really picked up yet, so nobody was watching the soldiers anymore. I flushed a deep red and snatched his kepi off the ground where it had fallen.
“Just help me help you up,” I said. “I can’t actually carry you.” I stuffed his kepi back on his head and reached for his hand.
My fingers disappeared inside Connor’s grasp, and I pulled him into a sitting position. Squatting beside him, I looped my arm beneath his and around his back.
“This is intimate,” Connor said mildly. I could feel his breath on my cheek, and I stared at Lola’s hooves, shifting my weight as I prepared to stand.
“Whatever. Count of three, okay?”
“Three.” Connor bent his legs and straightened abruptly, taking me with him. As soon as we were standing, however, he took his weight off his “wounded” leg and leaned on me. Lola’s reins hung uselessly off her neck. Connor reached over and grabbed them.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “She’ll follow you.”
He dropped the reins without argument, apparently glad to be rid of her.
The spectators cheered when we began to make our way off the battlefield. I could see Loren grinning as she snapped a picture before she slipped my camera back into my basket.
As Connor hopped through the tall grass, his body jostled mine, but it wasn’t really uncomfortable. His woolen coat gave him a little bit of padding, but as we slowed a bit to help him regain his balance, I realized I could faintly feel his pulse thudding against my ribcage. He was slow and ungainly, yet as his hand clasped my shoulder for support, I realized that having him this close to me was strangely non-repugnant.
Disturbed, I shifted to put some space between our torsos.
“Getting too heavy?” he asked, leaning on me a little more, grinning slightly.
“No, you just smell like ass.”
“Her name is Lola,” he said.
“Oh, shut up, Connor.”
Thank you for continuing to be my fangirl. *swishes shiny hair* hehe
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