Chance Reddick Box Set 1 Page 3

  Grandpa wasn’t so happy about it. “You know what you get when the chicken plants come in? You get illegals. People from Mexico and South America who came in to the country illegally, so they’ll work for less money than Americans, and they’ll do jobs that a lot of Americans just plain won’t do. I’m not saying they don’t have a right to work, but just read the news. Where you get a lot of illegals, you also get drugs and crime. That’s not prejudice, that’s just a fact.”

  “Grandpa, give it a chance,” Chance said. “The Toler company has done pretty good by Pikeville, and they don’t have a big drug problem. Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.”

  “We all better hope not,” the old man said. “All I know is you can’t turn on the news program without hearing about illegal aliens and drugs, and all the other crime that comes along with those things. This little town has been just about perfect for as long as I can remember, and I’d hate to see it get ruined just to bring in a bunch of new jobs.”

  The rest of the community didn’t feel as strongly about it, apparently, because a referendum to offer the Toler Corporation some limited tax breaks passed without much opposition. The plant would be built, and the company would enjoy reduced taxes for the first seven years. In return, they committed to keeping the plant open for at least twenty years, securing Silver Bell’s future for quite some time to come.

  Fall came, and Chance returned to school. His schedule kept him busy, between studies, work and his occasional dates. Time passed quickly, and before Chance knew it, it was time for his Christmas break. He left school a week before Christmas and drove home in the first heavy snowstorm of the year. What should have been a three-hour drive ended up taking nearly six hours, but he finally arrived safely at the farm.

  Robin was delighted to see him, and came running out into the snow to throw her arms around him. Chance stared at her, absolutely amazed at how much more she had grown since he had left in the fall.

  “Good grief, Robin,” he said. “It’s way below freezing out here, and the snow is a foot deep. You should have put a jacket on before you came out, and at least put some shoes on your feet.”

  “Oh, hush,” Robin said. “You sound like Grandma. I’m not going to freeze to death in a couple of minutes. Come on, let’s get inside. There somebody I want you to meet.”

  Chance’s eyebrows went up a bit, but he didn’t say anything until they got inside. Sitting there on the couch was a young man, and Chance didn’t have to look at his grandfather to know that the old man probably was scowling.

  “Chance,” Robin said, “this is Jorge Baldizon. He and his family just moved here from Guatemala, because his dad is going to be working at the new chicken plant. He goes to school with me now, and I’ve been telling him all about you.”

  Jorge grinned up at him and waved a hand. “Hello, Robin’s brother,” he said. “She has told me much about you.”

  Chance forced himself to grin, but his first thought was that the boy didn’t have the decency to stand up and shake hands. Could it be they didn’t teach manners in Guatemala? He would have thought proper manners was something that was taught everywhere, or at least should be.

  “Well, I wish I could say the same,” Chance said. “I’m afraid this is the first I’ve even heard of you. I take it you and Robin are friends?”

  “We’re dating,” Robin said. “Have been for about two months, now. Jorge is super nice, and he’s a lot of fun. Did you notice his car outside? It’s the Corvette, the new one.”

  Chance turned around and looked out the window, but all he saw was a snowdrift. It took him a moment to realize that it was actually shaped a bit like a new Corvette. He turned back to his sister.

  “A new Corvette?” He looked at Jorge. “Those are pretty expensive, aren’t they?”

  Grandpa snorted, but Jorge seemed not to notice.

  “A little bit, yes,” he said. “My family, we have a little money.”

  “Really? What brought you all the way up here to Kentucky? Guatemala is in South America, isn’t it? Doesn’t get a little cold up here for you guys?”

  “Oh, it does get cold, si ,” Jorge said. “My papa, he works for Mr. Toler. He will be one of the managers at the new chicken plant, so we have already moved here.”

  Robin was sitting on the couch beside Jorge, so close that it was almost hard to tell where Robin ended and Jorge began. Chance carried his bags back to his room, then came back to the living room and took a seat in a chair facing Jorge.

  The young man smiled a lot, but getting him to talk wasn’t very easy. He could obviously speak English fairly well, but he had a tendency to simply shrug when he was asked a question. The longer Chance spoke with him, the less he liked the idea of his sister dating him.

  Finally, Jorge said it was time for him to leave. Chance put on his jacket and boots and went out to help him clear the snow off his car, and took the opportunity for a private conversation.

  “Listen, Jorge,” he said. “I don’t know you, so I don’t really have anything against you, but I do want to tell you this. You do anything that hurts my sister and you’ll find out why nobody wants to mess with Chance Reddick. Do I make myself clear?”

  Jorge only grinned at him. “Your sister likes me, and I like her. What is there to hurt her about? I think we have no problem, Chance.”

  He got into his car and started it up, and Chance was surprised that how powerful it sounded. When Jorge put it into gear, the rear tires began spinning on the snow even before he touched the gas pedal. Chance had to give him a slight push to get him started backing out of the driveway, and then he was moving off down the road. Chance stood and watched his taillights disappear, then went back inside.

  The conversation between him and Robin that night could almost have been called an argument.

  “All I’m trying to say,” Chance said, “is that I want you to be careful. Robin, it’s not that I have anything against him, it’s just that you don’t make the kind of money that can afford to buy your kid a new Corvette by working at a Toler chicken plant.”

  “Well, obviously they did,” Robin shot back. “He’s got one, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he does, and that makes me wonder how he got it. Robin, that car cost more than his father could make in a year. There’s no way his daddy bought it for him, so I’d really like to know how he could afford to get it.”

  “You’re just prejudiced,” Robin said angrily. “What’s the matter, are there too many Hispanics at your college? Are they stealing all the girls or something? That’s what the guys here are saying, that Jorge and the other Guatemalans…”

  “Other Guatemalans? I thought it was just his family?”

  “Over three hundred of them have moved in,” Grandpa said suddenly. “I talked to Bryce Wilson at the police department the other day, and he said most of them don’t speak any English, and probably don’t even have green cards, but there’s some new rule that won’t allow him to check. Racial profiling, some crap like that.”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” Robin said. “He’s just a nice boy, that’s all. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to marry him or anything. He’s just a lot of fun hanging out with, that’s all.”

  “Well, what makes him so fun? What does he do that the other boys around here don’t?”

  Robin grinned at him. “He drives a new Corvette, for one thing,” she said. “And he takes me places that other boys don’t.”

  Chance narrowed his eyes. “Like what kind of places? Where does he take you that any other boy around here wouldn’t take you?”

  “Just places,” Robin said evasively. The look on her face made Chance think she was afraid she had said too much. “Like, sometimes, we go over to Lexington. They have better movies over there, and there’s places to go dancing and stuff.”

  Chance looked at her. “The only places to go dancing in Lexington are nightclubs. You’re letting this guy take you to clubs?”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m drinkin
g or anything,” Robin said angrily. “I’m not breaking the law just by being there, as long as it’s before 10 o’clock. We dance and hang out and have a soda or something, and then we come home. No big deal.”

  Chance ended up shaking his head, and finally went to bed. While he was trying to get through to her about the potential dangers of dating a boy like Jorge, he also remembered what it was like to be sixteen years old, so he was trying to look at things from her perspective.

  Chance had recently had his twenty-first birthday, however, and the realization that he was now an adult settled in hard. He was at least partially responsible for his sister, he figured, and lay there all night trying to think of some way to get through to her.

  It was well after two in the morning before he finally got to sleep.

  FIVE

  Over the next week, as Christmas drew nearer and nearer, Chance began to revise his opinion of Jorge. Unfortunately, it was revising downward, rather than upward. At different times when Jorge was around, Chance got the feeling that he expected the entire family to like him simply because Robin did. Chance had always felt that respect was something that needed to be earned, and while he tried very hard not to say anything when Robin could overhear, he was definitely not on team Jorge.

  Still, Christmas was coming. The last thing he wanted to do was cause any kind of bad feeling around the special holiday, so he continued to clamp his teeth down on his tongue whenever his sister was around.

  “That boy ain’t worth nothing,” Grandpa said over breakfast one morning. Christmas was still a couple of days away, and Jorge had arrived early to take Robin somewhere. The old man was speaking to Chance as the young couple drove away. “I’ve had chickens that had more brains than that boy, and that’s the truth.”

  “I’m not going to argue, Grandpa,” Chance said. “I don’t know what she sees in him, but I sure wish she’d get over it. And I still wish I knew where he gets his money. I’m just not a believer that old Toler pays his daddy that good.”

  “Brad Toler pays a decent wage,” Grandma said, speaking up for the first time in the conversation. “I’ve known him since we were in school together, and he’s not that bad. Still, I have to agree with you. I can’t see him paying a plant manager the kind of money it would take to be able to throw it away on a fancy car for a kid.”

  Grandpa grinned at Chance. “You know it’s bad when your grandma agrees with me,” he said. “I’m telling you, there is something fishy about that whole family.”

  Chance took a sip of his coffee and then looked at his grandfather again. “Has Bryce had anything to say about him?”

  Grandpa shook his head and scowled. “Not directly,” he said. “Matter of fact, he seems to think Jorge and his family are the best of the bunch. He don’t seem to understand that when you get one batch from South America, you seem to get thousands of them. I’m not saying anything bad about the people from any one country, but I can hear the news, same as anybody else. The more of them illegals they let in, the higher the crime rate goes. Why, Sheriff Baxter over at Hinckley arrested about two dozen of them a couple weeks back, for making meth. We never had meth around here, not till now. How hard is it to put two and two together?”

  Chance nodded slowly. “What about gangs? Have you heard anything about gang activity coming into this area?”

  “Yeah, there’s been some talk about it. I don’t know much about the gangs, but some drug cartel has been mentioned a couple times on the news out of Hinckley. I guess they’re not sure what to do about it, because there was talk of the state police coming in to teach some kind of class about gangs and drug cartels and how to handle them.”

  “We got a cartel up in Louisville,” Chance said. “Even around the campus, you can’t go very far without seeing cartel members and drug dealers.” He shook his head. “I hate to see that kind of stuff coming to Silver Bell. Heck, I hate to see it in Hinckley, but at least Hinckley is a lot bigger than we are.”

  “Shouldn’t be happening anywhere,” Grandpa said. “Damn liberals talk about how America is supposed to be a melting pot, and that’s all well and good. My own granddad came over here from Ireland more than a hundred years ago, because the opportunities here were better for a young man. I don’t see no problem with people coming here to live, long as they want to become part of America and help make it better. The South Americans, though, they run around with their flags on their cars and talking about how they have to keep their culture. They don’t seem to realize that their culture is back home, and their kids aren’t going to grow up in that culture. What their kids are going to see is a mixture of America and whatever fancy ideas they tell their kids about how great it was back home. Well, if it was all that great, how come they left?”

  The old man didn’t usually launch into such a speech, and Chance found himself grinning. “Grandpa, you’re starting to sound like some of the bloggers on the Internet. Maybe we should buy you a computer, and let you rant and rave about all this online.”

  “Yeah, right,” the old man said with a chuckle. “I couldn’t type when I had both hands working, it’d take me a week to write a sentence, now. No, them computers is for you young folks. I don’t need none of that sort of stuff.” He let out a sigh, and it was a long one. “I just wish I could get out there and do something. All I do is sit around, and it starts to make a man feel completely worthless after a while.”

  “You’re not worthless, Grandpa,” Chance said. “Far from it, in fact. Back at school, all that stuff you taught me over the years has come in pretty handy. I got to give a demonstration of blacksmithing a couple weeks ago. You should’ve seen the looks on the faces of the other students, when I’m up there hammering away on pieces of red-hot metal, and then they realize I was making a chain. I don’t think any of them ever thought about where chains came from before they had machines to make them.”

  “Of course they haven’t,” Grandpa said. “Schools nowadays, they do anything but teach a kid how to think. It plumb shocked me when you went to school and they let you take a calculator with you. When I was a kid in school, I had to memorize multiplication tables all the way up to twenty times twenty. Getting caught with a calculator probably would’ve got me suspended. Now they tell you to bring it to school so they don’t have to teach you how to find the answer on your own.”

  “You’re probably right,” Chance said, “but we’ve gotten off the subject. What are we gonna do about Jorge?”

  “If you’re smart,” Grandma interjected from the sink, where she was washing dishes, “you do absolutely nothing. Let me tell you from experience, the harder you try to convince her he’s bad news, the harder she’s going to hold onto him. You just be patient, Robin’s a smart girl. She’ll figure it out on her own.”

  Chance looked at his grandfather, who shrugged his one good shoulder. “I hope you’re right, Grandma,” he said. “I sure do hope you’re right.”

  The following day was Christmas Eve, and Chance was delighted when Robin told him that Jorge had to go and spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day with some of their family back in Pikeville. That meant that the family wouldn’t have to put up with him through the holidays, and the mood of the entire house lightened considerably.

  Robin and their grandmother had put the Christmas tree up a couple of weeks before, and there were already a number of presents stacked under it. Chance had brought several with him from school, but he had kept them hidden under the tarp in the back of his truck. He rose early on Christmas Eve and snuck out to the truck to get them, then carefully hid them behind some of the other gifts that were already waiting for the magical morning. He had bought three items for each of his family, and couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces.

  Christmas Eve passed pleasantly, and they all followed the Reddick family tradition of going to bed early that night. Chance was sure it had originally started back when his dad and his aunts were all young, to give Grandpa plenty of time to sneak in and put presents under th
e tree, presents that would be credited to jolly old Santa come the morning. It was still a tradition, though, so Chance and Robin didn’t argue. Besides, they all knew the next day was going to be a long one; it couldn’t hurt to get a little extra rest, so off to bed they went at 9 o’clock.

  Chance awoke to the smell of coffee and bacon, two aromas that he knew he was never going to grow tired of. He rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom, took care of his morning necessities and then went back into his room to get dressed for the day. He was coming down the stairs when he heard his grandfather calling his name, so he turned and went down to the ground floor hall to get to his grandparents’ bedroom.

  “Grandpa? You call me?”

  “I did,” the old man said. “I don’t know how it happened, but my chair is a bit too far away. Think you can help me slide over into it?”

  Chance grinned, then reached down and picked the old man up and set him into his powered chair. Grandpa smacked at his shoulder a couple times with his one usable hand, but the old fellow was chuckling while he did it.

  “All you had to do was move it closer,” he said. “I’m pretty good at sliding from the bed into the chair, or the chair onto the bed. Goodness, you ought to see me when I have to go to the toilet.”

  “Grandpa, have you ever heard the expression TMI?”

  “TMI? What is that, some new kind of medicine or something?”

  Chance shook his head, smiling. “No. It stands for ‘Too Much Information,’ and it’s what we say when somebody talks about things like going to the toilet. Trust me, I don’t need to watch you slide onto the toilet seat.”