The Buck Passes Flynn Read Online Free PDF

What had Satan said to them? How had he appeared? Well, we worked until three o’clock Tuesday morning, when we had to come home. Exhausted. Next morning we started out again. Grocery store was closed. Sheriff’s office was locked. Feed store. Few people were around, and I’ll swear, those few left because everyone else in town had. We kept tryin’ to feed the animals all that day and night. We knew we couldn’t save all the animals around Ada. Why, we didn’t even know how some ranches in Ada worked their water. Thursday, after prayer, I called the F.B.I. Was I wrong?”
    “No,” answered Flynn. “You were right.”
    “What could I do?”
    “Still no one told you why they were leaving town?”
    “Oh, they told us why, all right. They wanted their kids to see the ocean. What they didn’t say was how they could leave. How could they leave their homes, their ranches, their animals? How could they so fall in with Satan?”
    “Have you any answer to that?”
    “No,” said the Reverend Sandy Fraiman. “I don’t.”
    “What, then?” said Flynn, the sweat dribbling down him.
    “What, then? Well, I called some of the preachers around here I know and tried to tell them what happened. It must have sounded crazy, it must have—tellin’ ‘em everybody in Ada had run off their places leavin’ all their animals. It took some convincin’. Preachers in the other towns organized some ranchers and sooner or later they came over and took most of the animals off, the healthy ones anyway, to keep ’em fed and watered. They’re supposed to return ’em to the people of Ada, if and when they ever come back. They’ll see some feed bills then, you bet your life.… I expect—well, I know, the people from the other towns took some stoves and a few tractors and like that, for collateral, I guess, against the feed bills.”
    “The town has been plundered,” asserted Flynn.
    “I was thinkin’ on the animals,” the minister said uncomfortably. “I know the grocery was broken into.”
    Flynn heard a car.
    “What else was I supposed to do?”
    Flynn said, “I don’t know.”
    “Everybody in town left.”
    “Everybody?” asked Flynn. “Absolutely everybody?”
    “Well, no. There’s the pig woman.”
    “Pig woman?”
    “Old Mrs. Lewis. She’s a poor thing. Blessed by the Lord with her own craziness. She runs pigs in a gully just west of town.”
    When the minister heard the car he looked alert.
    He said, “That must be my wife. Marge.”
    Suddenly he got up and went into the kitchen.
    The kitchen was quiet.
    Flynn heard the car door bang.
    He got up and stepped quietly so he could see into the kitchen.
    The Reverend Sandy Fraiman was on his knees on the kitchen floor, shoving a nearly full bottle far back behind some cereal boxes.

6
    “BUT what about the earthquake?” she asked. “Did you tell Mister Flynn about the earthquake?”
    “I said there was no earthquake!”
    “I felt the tremors, Sandy. I surely did.”
    “There was no earthquake!” Standing barefooted in the yard between the house and the dusty old car, the Reverend Sandy Fraiman raised his hand to the sky. “That was Satan walking! He has walked in this land!”
    Marge Fraiman searched Flynn’s eyes for understanding.
    She was a slip of a woman in a long cotton dress hanging from her breasts, showing little of her white, skinny legs. Her hair was pulled back and clasped. It gave her a particularly drawn, tired look.
    Fraiman had introduced Flynn as she came through the back door with a bundle, then told her rapidly, nervously about what he had told Flynn as he went back and forth to the car, bringing in more bundles.
    In the kitchen, Marge Fraiman said, “I’ll bring you around, Mister Flynn. Show you what an abandoned town looks like.”
    “We can take my car,” said Flynn. “You might enjoy the air conditioning.”
    “First we’ll go to the grocery store,” she said. “We can walk there.”
    Leaving the minister to his