The Rise of Rachel Stark Read online

  "You're frightened, aren't you?" Celeste said. "That's OK. That's perfectly normal. You'll feel a lot better once you hear what I have to say.

  "First, let me tell you a little about myself. I was telling your parents, and I'll tell you. You have nothing to be afraid of. Everything is going to be just fine. I have been aborting pregnancies for 14 years, and I know what I'm doing. I've never lost a client, and that is the absolute truth.

  "I started doing this because I thought I could save lives. That's right, save lives. I lost two very dear friends in close succession many years ago because their pregnancies were aborted by men who had no idea what they were doing. And they charged exorbitant fees for what they did.

  "Well, I have had two years of medical school. I think it is important that you know that. I am not some junkie off the street who thinks she can just pick up a coat hanger and make an easy buck. I had to drop out of medical school for financial reasons, but even so, I did not get into this practice because I thought it would make me rich. I got into it because I thought it would make me useful. As I said, I thought I could provide a service that would save lives. Maybe I could even have saved the lives of my two friends. In any case, I think I have saved lives. In fact, I'm sure of it.

  "One other thing. I am not committed to going through with this procedure. Not at all. That might surprise you. But if you and your parents were to decide right now that you want to change your minds, I will pick up my case and leave, and you will never see me again. Do you understand that, Rachel?"

  Rachel opened her mouth as if to speak. She was groping for her voice, but no sound came forth.

  Finally, in a faint whisper that seemed almost otherworldly, Rachel said, "Help … me … "

  Celeste turned to look at Mom and Dad.

  "We've … we've decided to do this," Benjamin Stark said in a soft voice. "We've been all through this, time and time again. I'm sorry, Rachel."

  Holly Stark wept. Her shoulders shook.

  Celeste reached into her case and pulled out a little bottle.

  "Well," she said. "We can't do anything right now. She's too tense. Her body is rigid. It wouldn't be a good idea to get started now."

  Celeste picked up a glass of water on the homemade wooden chair that served as a nightstand by the bed.

  "Rachel," she said, "this is a tranquilizer. It will relax you and make you feel much better, I promise. Dad, will you help me raise her a bit so she can take this?

  "Then we'll wait 20 minutes and see where we are."

  Chapter Five

  Why Rachel?

  "It's the cemetery!" Tabby cried, breaking the group's long silence.

  "Where?" someone asked.

  "At the top of the hill," Tabby said. "I can see that big iron arch."

  "Yeah, I think I see it too," Bull said.

  "That means we probably have a little more than a mile to go," Sheldon said. "We're almost there."

  "Thank god," Jimmy said. "I'm getting cold feet." He paused. "I mean that literally." He paused again. "It was a joke."

  They all wanted to laugh, but no one did. What Jimmy said was too close to the truth.

  They hunched their shoulders against the wind. From time to time they broke into a slow jog. But mostly they withdrew into their own private worlds. Like the birds in flight, they all wondered in unison how it came about that they were trudging up a snowy road on Christmas Eve to help a girl they hardly knew, and why they were so drawn to her.

  Bull Evenshot

  Bull remembered how Jimmy drove him home after an ice skating party on the frozen Missouri River one Saturday night a couple of years ago.

  It was a night he thought about every day, and probably would think about it every day for the rest of his life. But tonight the images were clearer, the pain more intense than usual.

  ●●●

  "See ya," Jimmy said as Bull got out of the car.

  "Later," Bull said.

  Bull looked out the front window of his living room and watched until Billy's taillights disappeared down the street. He ran his finger across the ice that had formed on the windowpane. He squinted to get a look at the thermometer mounted alongside the window outside: 6 degrees below zero. He wondered whether the cherry vodka he drank at the party would keep his breath from freezing on the windowpane. He blew on the glass and watched it fog up and begin to freeze, giving the street light on the corner an odd, fuzzy glow.

  Behind him, the wood stove had nearly gone out. He laid his hand on its flat, black surface. Almost cold. He shuddered. His parents would not be up for several hours. By then, the house would be an icebox.

  He opened the door to the stove and jostled the dying embers with a long iron. He decided there was enough fire left to catch some new wood.

  He threw in three, then four, then five pieces of wood. He left the door open for a few minutes to give the fire more air, until the wood ignited. The stove was so full of wood he had to force the stove door shut. Then he went to bed.

  By the time the smoke that had drifted into Bull's bedroom woke him up, the living room was ablaze. When he saw it, he screamed for his parents, whose bedroom was at the other end of the house.

  Getting no answer, he retreated from the heat and ran back into his room and closed the door. He flipped the light switch, but there was no power. He had gone to bed mostly dressed, and had only to put on his shoes, which he groped for in the dark and finally found. It seemed to take his shaking hands forever to pull them on.

  He could feel the heat on his door. He could smell the paint on it starting to blister. There was no way out except his bedroom window. He tried to open it, but it was frozen shut. He fumbled in his closet for his baseball bat. He could hear the thunderous roar of the fire. Flames licked around the edges of the door, and he choked from the smoke.

  Finally he laid his hands on the bat. He crawled to the window and smashed it. The frigid air rolled in. He could feel the jagged glass cut into his arms, his stomach, his thighs as he pulled himself through the opening and fell out into the snow.

  By now, the living room roof had collapsed, and the fire was moving rapidly toward both ends of the house. Bull, dripping blood, ran through the snow to his parents' bedroom and screamed their names. There was no sign of movement inside.

  Suddenly the room exploded in flames. Bull backed up, then ran toward the bedroom window and hurled his body through the glass. He flew into the room and landed at his father's bare feet. Fighting to stay conscious, he grabbed his dad's legs and pulled him outside through the window.

  They landed in a heap in the snow, and Bull was able to drag him several yards away from the house. He started to run back for his mother when the entire roof gave way with a monstrous roar, and the house became an inferno.

  Bull staggered back, sank to his knees at his father's side and rocked back and forth, unable to speak. He felt a faint tug on his sleeve. His father was still alive and was trying to say something. Bull leaned down to him.

  "It's all right," his dad whispered. "You're a good boy."

  The house had burned nearly to the ground when the fire truck pulled up. Bull, smeared with soot and frozen blood, was still rocking back and forth, chanting an ancient Siouan prayer he did not even know he knew, still kneeling beside his father, whose blackened body lay lifeless, steaming in the midnight snow.

  ●●●

  That was the connection to Rachel, Bull said to himself as he and his friends walked up Cemetery Road. He knew it all along. He just had to remind himself. Remind himself of his early life on the reservation, watching young Indian men drink themselves to death, or kill each other with guns and knives, or rip themselves to bloody pieces in car wrecks. He traveled the same road Rachel did. The dirt road of poverty, of having people look down on you because you're poor, of knowing that death is always nearby.

  But no one, no white man, no politician, no one ever, could tell Bull his father was not one of the finest men who ever walked this Earth.

/>   "He told me I was a good boy," Bull said aloud. "Death had him in its grasp, and he told me … I was a good boy."

  Tears streamed down his cheeks and fell into the snow.

  Jimmy Blaze

  Why, Jimmy wondered, was his life so full of tragic figures?

  His father was killed in the Korean War. His death was almost more than Jimmy's mother could bear. She sought solace in strong drink and weak men, and for a long time Jimmy worried that she would die too soon as well. And just when everyone thought she had finally conquered her demons, she did.

  Die, that is.

  And now Rachel Stark. Trailer trash. Poor. Pregnant and unmarried. An uneducated father with no particular skills. Welfare recipients. A mother who keeps having baby after baby after baby. Children who come to school in threadbare clothes.

  Easy targets for scorn and ridicule, the Stark family. All the ingredients for revilement by people who have a need to feel superior to others, who have a need to blame someone, anyone – poor people will do – for all of the country's ills, are there.

  Just like it was for Jimmy and his mother.

  It can even be a deadly list of ingredients.

  Just like it was for Jimmy and his mother.

  Jimmy was afraid he would be too late to save Rachel.

  Just like he was for his mother.

  ●●●

  In the winter of 1963, Penelope Blaze, Jimmy's mother, looked up at the clock. It was 5:30, quitting time. But she had five minutes worth of filing left to do, so she went ahead and did it. Nobody worried about a minute or two, even an hour or two, one way or the other, at Ray's Feed & Seed, where she had worked for the past two months as a filing clerk.

  The job came open when Edna Conkey, who had worked there for almost 32 years, decided to retire. A month later, Edna died. Must have known it was coming, the townsfolk said, and so she went home to get prepared.

  When Penelope heard Edna was about to quit, she mustered her courage and went to talk to Ray Howsley. Ray wasn't that far from retirement himself, and maybe he was a little tired and not capable of good judgment anymore. The townsfolk said that, too, when they heard Ray gave Penelope the job.

  But they changed their minds pretty quickly. Penelope showed up for work every day, on time, never missed a day, never late. And she was a hard worker and a quick learner, Ray said, took to the job like hogs to the trough.

  Ray did a fair amount of gloating after that, and the townsfolk said, as they usually did with most things they passed judgment on, that they knew it all along.

  For her part, Penelope seemed immensely happy. She loved the work, she told everybody, loved the security of it, how it made her feel about herself.

  And she loved the smell of the feed store, the smell of new-mown hay mingled with the sweetness of early-spring earth. She couldn't get enough of it, she said, and every morning when she came into work she would just walk around the place, drawing in deep breaths.

  What's more, she hadn't touched a drop since she started work. She was even talking about going to school to learn a trade, or maybe even become a nurse. Ray encouraged her to do that, said he would help her out any way he could. He admired her, he told her, for the way she had turned her life around.

  Penelope pushed the last file drawer shut and straightened up her desk. It was a quarter to six on a Wednesday. She bid Ray good night and walked out the door.

  Penelope headed straight for Robbie's Bar, six doors down from the feed store on the same side of the street. She went in and pulled up onto a barstool. The place was empty save for a couple of regulars who had come in to get out of the cold.

  The bartender-owner was a beefy, red-faced giant named Rob Anderson. He once had tattoos on both forearms that he had tried to have removed. It left him with a pair of ugly patches of scar tissue. He was wiping down the bar when Penelope walked in, and he eyed her for a second.

  "Penelope," he said. "Haven't seen you in awhile."

  "Hey, Rob."

  Rob had heard Penelope was on the wagon. Everybody in town knew it. "You want something?" he said.

  "Think I'll have a cigarette."

  "Good enough." He picked up his rag and started wiping again.

  Penelope lit up, took a deep drag and blew the smoke straight at the huge mirror back of the bar. She wasn't allowed to smoke at the feed store, not that she would have anyway. The smell there. Nothing like here. Stale beer. Smoke. Vomit. Urine.

  She had a second cigarette, then a third, a fourth. Meanwhile, a couple of young men had come in and were playing a game of shuffleboard while they drank draft beer, talked loudly and sang along with the jukebox.

  "Hey, Rob," Penelope called. She had been sitting on her bar stool for almost an hour. "Gimme a double."

  "You sure, Penelope?"

  "Damn it, Rob!"

  He shrugged, poured the whiskey and set it front of her. She downed it with one gulp. "Another," she said.

  A couple of hours later Rob tried to send her home. "I'm not driving," Penelope said. "I'm walking. So I'll stay here long as I want to."

  "Well, you're hardly even walking," Rob said.

  "Oh, shut the hell up," she said, and let out a long cackle. She slid off her barstool and staggered to a booth, where a housepainter named Clint Hansen, who had been watching, joined her. They drank and filled the bar with drunken conversation. They danced to the music of the jukebox and pawed each other and kissed until Rob told them to knock it off. They didn't argue. Rob had been known to place one of his burly paws on top of the bar and vault over it to break up a fight or grab a customer and toss him out into the street.

  At midnight, Rob came over to their booth. "I'm closing," he said. "Let's all go home."

  "Sounds good to me," Clint shouted. "C'mon, honey, let's you and me go home."

  "Not tonight, you big dork, I've got a headache." She cackled again.

  "C'mon, now, don't be that way."

  Penelope staggered out the door as Rob was turning off the lights. Clint was right behind her. Out on the street, he grabbed her by the arm. "C'mon, now, let's go."

  Penelope jerked free and almost fell down. "I said not tonight. I'm going home. So leave me alone."

  "You been talking shit all night and now you're going home? What the hell is that?"

  "Get outta here. I'm going home." She walked away.

  "Bitch! Prick tease!" Clint yelled.

  He spun her around and threw a drunken punch that missed Penelope but hit the concrete block wall straight on, shattering several bones in his hand. He fell to the sidewalk and lay there twisting and moaning.

  Penelope cackled and staggered away, bumping into buildings as she went down the street, but staying on her feet.

  Two blocks from home she passed out and fell into a ditch. She lay there for some time before she woke up and tried to get on her feet. She slipped and fell several times before she managed to crawl out and stand up.

  Her bare hands had turned blue with the cold. The snow swirled around her in gusts. Two or three times she fell to her knees and threw up. She sloshed around in her own vomit as she tried to get up again.

  Finally she found herself standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, but she seemed unsure how she got there, unsure where she was. She stared at the house for a second, then seemed to recognize it. She put her hands in front of her as she began to stagger toward it.

  When she got to the concrete steps leading up to the front door, she reached for the railing but missed and fell. Her head popped against a step.

  When Jimmy walked out the door to go to school the next morning, he found her iced-over body. A stream of frozen blood the color of her hair led nearly to the street.

  ●●●

  "I could have saved her," Jimmy said aloud. "When she didn't come home for dinner that night I should have gone out and looked for her. Why, why, why didn't I? Why? I waited till morning, and by then it was too late."

  The snowstorm was getting heavier, and Ji
mmy broke into a trot.

  "Hurry!" he yelled to his friends.

  "Hurry!"

  Tabby Moore and Sheldon Beasley

  Tabby Moore and Sheldon Beasley walked arm in arm up Cemetery Road. They lagged behind Jimmy and Bull, not because their sense of urgency was waning or because they were physically unable to keep up, but because they wanted to talk.

  Privately.

  Not as lovers – this was hardly the time for that. They wanted to talk simply because it was what they did. They began talking with each other almost as soon as they were able to talk. And talking is what had kept them together ever since.

  "I got what you were doing when you asked whether we had the right to invade the Stark family's privacy," Sheldon said.

  "I knew you would," Tabby said. She smiled at him.

  "You just wanted to give those guys the chance to, well, to confirm, I guess, to confirm, maybe in their own minds as much as to us, that what we're doing is really what they want to do," Sheldon said.

  "Well," Tabby said, "Jimmy sure didn't leave any doubt where he stood, did he?" She gave a little laugh.

  "No, he was rather forceful, huh?" Sheldon said. "And Bull, he's solid. We don't have to worry about Bull."

  "And you? How about you? We've had some pretty wild adventures together, but this one really scares me. So I could ask myself the same question. What about me? How solid am I?" Tabby said.

  Sheldon thought about it for a few seconds.

  "I guess at least part of the answer to that," Sheldon said, "has to do with what binds one person to another. What is it about Rachel Stark that makes us want to take what you have to admit is a very, very serious step – barging uninvited into someone's house in the dark of night and essentially telling a mother and father that they can't do – that we won't allow them to do – what they think is best for their daughter."

  "I really don't know Benjamin and Holly Stark all that well," Tabby said. "I think they are decent, hard-working, good people. But although I'm sure they do think an abortion is best for Rachel, I wonder whether they're more concerned about themselves than they are about Rachel. I think they have a selfish interest in this."