The Witch's Graduation

"Which reminds me. It's after 9 AM out east. Which means I need to start making more phone calls. And you need to get to school." Susanna checked her watch and started for the door. "I'll see you this afternoon," she called at the disappearing figure. "Be good."

%%%

"I'll be honest, kid," said the construction foreman. "I have no idea how you got this job." He tossed Steve's file down on the battered metal desk in front of him and stared at Steve's gangly figure.

"You're nineteen. You have no highway work or construction experience. You look like a rake someone left out in the rain. Hell," he continued, "I've got men and women with twenty, thirty years of experience out there. What am I supposed to do with you?"

"Put me to work," Steve said evenly. His heart was hammering in fear. The prospect of a job, a real job, was what had given him the courage to break away from Grant. If the foreman decided he was better off without him, what was he going to do?

"Mr. Diehl..."

"Call me Dutch, kid. Everyone else does."

"Dutch," Steve nodded. "I've worked tough jobs before. I've walked beans in Illinois. I've detassled in Nebraska," Dutch's eyes widened a fraction in respect.

"Rough work, walking beans," he nodded. "But this is a hot, dirty, stinking job. There isn't a single easy position out there."

"Do you mean it isn't just standing on the highway with a sign in your hand?" Steve asked. "I knew that when I filled out the application.

"I'm single. Which means that you won't have to worry about me asking for a day off because my kid is sick, or because my wife and I want a three-day weekend. I'll be here, every day. Tell me what you need done, and I'll do it. Train me to do a job, and you won't have to tell me twice." He opened his arms wide. "Give me a chance and you won't regret it."

Dutch nodded slowly. "Okay, kid," he said. "I'll give you till the end of next week. That's eight days, with the holiday coming up next Monday. Last that long, and I'll keep you on permanent until the season is over. Fuck it up, and you're out on your ass."

He drummed his thick fingers on his desk. "I'll put you on cones and flags to start out. You'll team with Morty." He pushed the paperwork over to Steve. "Sign on the dotted line, kid. Makes it all nice and legal for the tax man. You're starting at the lowest end of the pay grade, of course."

Steve scribbled his signature. Then his eyes fell on his hourly wage, and his brain nearly blew up.

"Nineteen dollars an hour?" he whispered, looking at Dutch in shock.

Dutch grinned. "Union gig. You'll be asked to join before your lunch break, if I'm any judge. But don't worry, kid," he finished. "We'll make sure we get our money's worth out of you.

"Now get to work, rookie."

Chapter 5

John sat tiredly in the locker room. His erection raged against his uniform pants, but he stayed hunched over, disguising his arousal with his posture. It also, he thought sourly, served as a fitting picture of how thoroughly his team had been beaten.

The game had been a rout from the get-go. Hoover, the second-place team in the conference, had drilled the North High pitchers from the first inning onwards. Eventually John had grown numb to the sound of clanking bats as hit after hit whistled through their porous defense.

John had two hits, including the first, and only, home run of his career, a deep drive to left field in the bottom of the fifth inning. But Hoover had won by the slaughter rule, fifteen to two.

Coach Markovitz finally broke the silence. "All right, guys," he said softly. "Pick your heads up. This year didn't work out the way we all hoped. In fact, it pretty much sucked." He waited until the snickers died down.

"But you always gave me the best you had. And I'm not the sort of guy to demand that anyone do more than that. So I just want to tell you all that I'm proud of you.

"So hit the showers, collect your gear, and hit the road. Those of you who aren't graduating, I'll be in touch about fall workouts once school starts up again."

With soft mutters, the team started to clean up the detritus of a lost season.

"Chamberlain? Come and see me in my office for a second."

John's head snapped up. His eyes met those of Coach Markovitz, carefully blank.

"It'll just take a second, John," he said easily.

%%%

John sat down in the chair across from Coach Markovitz' desk in his office, which was filled with old equipment and paraphernalia. He took off his cap and ran a hand through his sweat-slicked hair.

"Nice hit there in the last inning, John," said Coach, his gray eyes carefully watching John's face.

"Thanks," John said. "Finally managed to get a hold of one," he said, with a self-deprecating smile.

Coach nodded, eyes distant. "John, how long have you been part of this program?"

John frowned. "I was on jayvee when I was a sophomore, with Coach Murdock. Then two years on varsity with you. Not that you seemed to notice me much," he said, more than a trace of bitterness in his voice.

Fuck it, he thought. I've given this old fart hundreds of hours of my life. I don't have anything to aplogize for. All he wanted to do was to shower and go home. The Goddess had told him that the time had come to close the ritual with his Aunt Sybil, and he was looking forward to the evening.

Coach nodded, taking no offense. "And your mom and your aunt run that creepy voodoo store downtown, right?"

"It's not..." John caught a gleam of amusement in Coach's eyes. "Fine. Whatever. Yes. Do you have a point, Coach?"

"Yes," he said, spitting tobacco juice into a paper cup. "You may not know it, but some people around here are watching you. And your family. Your cousin Hilda was like you. On the softball team, eager as hell, but no talent to speak of. Then halfway through her junior year it was like a light switch went off. All-conference two years in a row, and some MVC teams were talking scholarship. But she turned them down."

Junior year, thought John. Was that when Hildy crossed?

"And now we have you. Christ, kid, the only reason you were on the team at all the last two years is because hardly no one comes out for baseball at this school. You might be a half-decent swimmer, but you were as clumsy as hell on the diamond. You knew what to do," he said with a half-smile, "but your body never coordinated with you.

"Then last Friday something happened. You learned how to hit. You're actually graceful. If I had a full season of you as you are now, you might have some colleges sniffing around."

"I'm already going to..." Coach waved him off.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said impatiently. "You're going to Chambana with your sister. I had her in my health class last year. Nice girl. The point is, kid, no has that sort of athletic change at the drop of a hat.

"Now, me," he said. "I've got some old Polish blood in me. And my grandma told me some tales about the old country that would turn your hair white.

"So what I am saying, kid, is watch your ass," his voice and face were suddenly grim. "I'm not sure what your family is fucking around with, but if I'm noticing it, then other people will, too. Des Moines might seem like a big city compared with Osceola or Coon Rapids, but a lot of people here are still small-minded and suspicious, and there have been some strange things happening in this town lately.

"Hopefully," he said, "no one is going to pay attention to one kid who had a couple of good games for a crappy high school baseball team. Even if his mom and aunt run the only voodoo book shop in the area."

John nodded. "I will, sir," he said, not even trying to deny the supernatural. Anything less than honesty with this man, he thought, would be silly.

Coach stood and held out his hand. "I'll see you at the team banquet," he concluded, as John shook his hand. "And you'll get a letter for that jacket of yours.

"And John?" he said as he was about to leave the office.

"Good luck. To all of you."

%%%

Steve sat at the drop-off, waiting to be picked up, limp, beaten, and exhausted.

He had done hard work before. His first day detassling corn for Bullz-I Seed in Nebraska, at the ripe old age of fourteen, had left him sunburned, covered in cuts from the leaves, and woozy with dehydration. Walking beans in Illinois had proven to be grueling, backbreaking work. But nothing had prepared him for the misery that resulted from working on a road crew in Iowa.

It was a combination of tedium and terror, Steve had decided numbly after the first few hours had crawled past. True to his word, Dutch had teamed him with Morty, a grizzled man in his mid-fifties who looked like he had been constructed out of rawhide, fence wire, and beef jerky.

Morty had taken one look at him, rolled his eyes, and with a jerk of his head, had guided him over to the area where the rest of the crew was setting up in preparation for the day. With short, terse sentences, he had instructed him in the placement of the large orange barrels which were referred to as "cones" by the road crews.

Sweating in the morning sun, Steve had worked to place the cones properly. Too far in one direction, Morty told him, and he would force traffic too far onto the shoulder. Too far in another, and the rest of the crew would be in danger from cars drifting into the work zone.

And that was a danger that Steve could appreciate. The first time a car had screamed by him, ruffling his jeans and shirt in the slipstream of its passing, he had conceived a whole new respect for the power of the automobile. He stared after the car with wide eyes.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, he turned to see Morty measuring him thoughtfully.

"Well, maybe you'll do after all," the older man said. He took off his hat and scratched the gray stubble on his head thoughtfully.

"Huh?"

Morty sighed, and helped Steve wrestle a cone in place as another car hurtled past. "You see, kid, they're three types of people when it comes to a job like this. The first kind, well, they think they're gonna live forever, and when a car comes blazin' by like that, they get all angry about it."

"I can see their point," Steve offered, trying to match Morty's sodbuster accent. "The guy must've been doing dang near seventy."

Morty tossed his head back and laughed. "Are you kidding me, boy? Trust me, when someone flies by going that fast, you'll know it after a while. Nope," he continued. "Geraldine has the "slow" flag up, couple hundred yards down." Squinting, Steve could make out a thin figure holding up a sign in the distance. "That lady was doing forty, maybe forty-five, just as she should.

"Now the first kind," he said, picking up the thread of his story, "the first kind, they get all angry about it. Figure they always have the right of way. Which we do," he added, "but most vehicles aren't concerned about right of way, and a car will kill you just as dead if you are in the right or the wrong. Lots of rookies get their sorry selves killed that way.

"Now the second kind, they just can't handle it. They're so dang scared of the cars they walk off the job. Some don't even bother to clock out or tell the manager. They just run.

"I like that kind better, to tell the truth. At least they have the good sense to realize this job can kill you.

"Then there's the third kind. Which I hope you are. The third kind is what I call proper scared. You know that the car can kill you. But you got enough guts to stay on. And you're smart enough to not take stupid chances."

From behind them came a distant shout. Morty and Steve looked down the highway, to where Dutch was looking at them impatiently, hands braced on his hips. Morty gave a wave of his arm, and turned back to Steve.

"Come on, rookie," he grinned, showing a gap in his teeth. "These cones ain't gonna roll themselves out there all by their lonesome."

"My name," Steve said with strained patience, "is Steve. Steve Johnson."

Morty nodded. "You last two weeks, and maybe I'll call you what your momma named you. Until then, you're a rookie, kid. Grab a cone. We got a highway to fix."

%%%

He had set up cones for a couple hours, and then Dutch had put him on a flag at the far end of the site. The "flag" was, in reality, simply a metal pole with an off-set orange square on top which told the drivers to resume speed. Car after car had blown by him, accelerating as they left the reduced-speed zone of the construction site. As the sun crept higher and sweat poured down his back, Steve couldn't quite figure out whether to be bored or terrified.

By noon, his thermos was dry, and he had happily broken for lunch, which he had eaten in the shade of one of the trucks as several other members of the construction crew had debated the merits of Big Twelve football teams.

In the afternoon, Dutch had pulled him off flag duty and sent him to watch a team patch potholes ("Not that I'm going to let you even touch a shovel for a couple of weeks, kid, but you might as well learn how it's done"). True to his word, it was hot, stinking work, and the stench of the fill had left him nauseated and woozy. Then it was back to cones, as he and Morty had removed the ones from the area that had been completed, and moved them up to where they would be needed the next morning.

The sharp beep of a horn interrupted his tired thoughts, and he opened his eyes to see Susanna's red Honda idling by the curb. She was standing by the open driver's-side door, watching him with concerned eyes.

He levered himself to his feet and shuffled across the grassy verge to the passenger door. Once inside, he collapsed with a groan, dropping his knapsack at his feet. Susanna got back in and immediately wrinkled her nose.

"I know, I stink," he said, not even turning his head. He rolled down his window and hung one hand limply out the side. In his head, he was re-doing the calculations which had kept him going throughout the interminable day.

Nineteen dollars an hour. Times eight hours is one hundred and fifty-two dollars. Payday is a week from Friday, according to Morty. Eight days on the job. One hundred fifty-two times eight is one thousand two hundred sixteen dollars. Take out one-third for taxes and union dues. Is Memorial Day a paid holiday? Ask Morty tomorrow.

Eight hundred dollars and change. Minimum. One hundred dollars a day. Two days will pay my rent. The other six...a decent phone? Necessities for the basement? A little something for Claire and the rest of them? A date with Ellie?

And if I can keep from screwing up too bad, I can keep this job through September. And maybe by then I can line something up for the winter. Maybe Dutch can recommend me for a real construction job? Something inside? Or if I save enough, I can start classes in a community college? God, I might have a couple grand saved if I play my cards right.

He grinned wearily. For so long, his life had been constrained, his choices dictated. For once, he would be able to determine the path he chose.

But not immediately, it seemed. He looked at Susanna. "This isn't the way back to your place, is it?"

"Nope," she said cheerfully. "Mom asked me to run a few errands when I left. I hope you don't mind." Her expression indicated it wouldn't do Steve a lot of good if he minded or not.

"I could care less," he said, with a wave of his hand. He slouched back into the fabric of the car seat. "Just leave me here and wake me up when we get home."

Home, he thought woozily. How has a place I've lived in for less than two days become home already? Dimly he was aware of the car coming to a stop, and Susanna exiting the driver's side.

His thoughts were interrupted as his door opened and an arm pulled him out of his seat.

"Urk!" he exclaimed, trying to recover his balance. He looked up to see Susie eying him with an expression that could only be defined as "aggressively perky".

"You're not staying in here while I shop," she said. "Your muscles will get all stiff and by the time we get home we'll need a prybar to get you out of the car."

"Uh-huh," he said, eying her suspiciously. He limped into the grocery store behind her, trying to ignore the seductive sway of her hips and the shapely curves of her ass. He tried to convince himself it was her sister he was attracted to, not Susie herself.

Get all stiff, he snorted to himself. Get a grip, man. He didn't know what genes had produced the various beauties of Clan Chamberlain, but they were on the job today.

Inside the store, Susanna somehow managed to produce a shopping list from the skin-tight recesses of her shorts. She unfolded it, apparently unaware of the air-conditioning which was making the tips of her breasts press oh-so-firmly against the thin material of her shirt. Steve turned away, dipping a hand into his pocket to make a frantic adjustment to his groin. Susanna smiled a tiny smile as she observed Steve's discomfort, and wished momentarily that the rhythms of her body had not made her temporarily unavailable as his lover.

All in good time, she thought. The Goddess has brought him to us. She will not be so cruel as to take him away. She picked up a hand-basket, then smiled at him.

"Let's go."

%%%

Sybil's car was in the driveway when John got home. He entered the house to see his mother sitting at the kitchen table, sheets of paper scattered around her. Claire's mouth was set in a frustrated line, and she looked like she was about ready to throw the phone in front of her through a wall.

"Hi, Mom," he said, bending to kiss her cheek. Instead, she caught his mouth with hers, and a quick peck turned into a long lover's kiss.

"Down here," she urged. Ignoring the hold music coming from the phone's speaker, he dropped to his knees in front of her. She pushed up her shirt, giving him access to her breasts. Knowing instinctively what she needed, he leaned in and caught her nipple in his mouth. Suckling gently, he reached up with his other hand and caressed her breast and side, gentle fingers tracing patterns of pleasure over her skin.

"Oh, Goddess, I needed that," she breathed softly, "I've been fighting these people for information all damned..."

"Miss Chamberlain? Are you still there?" the phone squawked.

Claire quickly snatched up the receiver, "Yes, Velma, I'm here. I was beginning to think you'd run out on me."

A warm laugh came from the phone. "Sorry, honey, but sometimes it takes a while to dig what I need out of the database. I think I have what you need. It isn't going to make you happy, but that poor boy of yours might be relieved to hear it.

"Morning Glory Orphanage was shut down in the fall of oh-nine. All sorts of legal issues. Misappropriation of funds, false reporting to state agencies, bribery, the whole works. Eight people went to jail. Three are still there.

"Now this young man of yours...I have to tell you, sweetie, it looks bad. There is no record of a boy named Steven Johnson being adopted."

Air hissed between Claire's teeth and her lips parted in a triumphant snarl. At her feet, John softly pushed her skirt up above her waist. Her pantyless crotch beckoned to him as he kissed his way up her thighs.

"I suspected as much, Velma," Claire said, the merest hint of a waver in her voice as John approached her cleft, tongue licking deftly in her folds. "What information do you have about him?"

"According to our records, Steven Johnson was reported missing, probable runaway, in April of two thousand and eight. Presumed dead in November of two thousand eight."

"Presumed dead?" Claire's voice was sharp. "But not legally declared dead?"