by J. M. Hayes
“Where’d he go?”
“Last I saw, he was on foot and crossing the park toward Bertha’s.”
The sheriff exchanged puzzled frowns with his companions in the Cadillac. No one offered any opinions.
“Mrs. Kraus. You got a clue what this is about?”
“Nary a one, Sheriff.”
“Anybody?” The sheriff offered Judy and Wynn the elder a chance to contribute to the conversation. They were too busy shivering, recovering from the chilling effort of checking the cruiser.
“OK. We’re on our way to Mad Dog’s. We’ll call from there.”
“Or sooner if you like. It’s frustrating, sitting here in the cold and dark, all alone, not knowing what’s going on.”
The sheriff understood. It was every bit as frustrating from where he sat.
***
“You know what a breech birth is?” Doc asked.
Mad Dog knew, but not exactly. “Sort of.”
“The baby doesn’t turn the way it’s supposed to for a normal delivery. It tries to come feet or butt first. Things get all twisted up. It’s no big deal anymore, if you’re in a maternity ward or a good clinic. There are techniques to turn the baby, or you can just do a C-section. Problem is, nobody saw this girl during her pregnancy but me, and then just to confirm it. Nobody with any real training was there when she went into labor. They let it go on too long. By the time Becky Hornbaker got Mary here, she was exhausted from hours of contractions. I was going to do a Caesarian, but Becky wouldn’t hear of it. We tried some other techniques. They worked, much to my surprise. I got the baby turned and coming the right way, only it was a slow delivery because Mary didn’t have it in her to push very hard. When we finally got the baby’s head out, the umbilical cord was twisted around its neck. Blood wasn’t flowing through the cord the way it’s supposed to.”
Mad Dog nodded, sympathetically. “So that’s why it was born dead.”
“No. The baby was alive. There was a pulse.”
“But you said…”
“I told you, Mad Dog. I lied. I delivered that baby in a hurry then. All I needed to do was clear its windpipe, get it breathing on its own. Only this was a baby Simon Hornbaker persuaded me should never have been born. Rape and incest. And the child’s mother is retarded. This baby had all kinds of chances for birth defects and brain damage. I looked at this infant and saw what I wanted to see. Head shape was wrong. Color wasn’t good. It had been without proper oxygen flow for a while. Too long, maybe. I played God. Oh, it was stillborn, but only because I didn’t prevent that.”
“No!” Mad Dog couldn’t imagine Doc doing that. It was like finding out Santa brought cancer instead of toys.
“What I did was worse than an abortion,” Doc confessed. Mad Dog wasn’t qualified to hear one, though he was a priest of sorts, and probably the only one in Benteen County to whom Doc would tell all this. “I pulled a Kevorkian. Some might call it a mercy killing, a kindness, considering all that child had going against him, but I’m not sure I can go hide there. Mad Dog, I murdered that child.”
***
Wynn Some, Lose Some didn’t exactly leap from the roof. He hadn’t been all that keen on leaving the sleeping porch. It had a wall that stood about three feet above its floor. If you hunkered down it kept you out of the worst of the storm’s fury. Only the girls shamed him into leaving. They weren’t going to let Becky and the Hornbakers cage them out here where they’d slowly freeze to death. They punched a hole in the screen on the west side, then hopped across and tested the roof above the wrap-around exterior porch. It held, and one of them came back to argue that they could crawl under a window or two and pick a place to get down where they wouldn’t be easy to see from inside. She made him feel like a wimp for not leading the escape effort. Besides, he didn’t want to stay behind alone.
The gap the Heathers hopped with ease looked like an immense chasm from the edge of the porch.
“Don’t look down,” One hollered, so he did. It was hard to believe he was only on the second story. The ground at the edge of the house looked far enough below to kill the man unlucky enough to plunge to its depths. It took him several tries to work up his nerve. He got one hand on the side of the house to help pull, used the other to push off from one of the uprights that supported the porch roof, then kicked off with every ounce of his strength.
It was more than enough. He landed two feet beyond the edge he’d been concerned with. He also landed closer to the downhill edge, where the roof drained into a series of gutters that fed the shrubbery below. And, he landed on his heels. Normally, they would have bit into the shingles and he would have stopped abruptly, maybe even stumbled back into the edge of the house behind him. Today did not qualify for normally. It was a snow-slick slope and he hit it with force and velocity. His feet went out from under him, his arms windmilled past a pair of girls frantically trying to grab him, and he did a backward somersault while proceeding inexorably toward the brink. He got back onto his hands and knees in time to see it coming and pushed off hard enough to delay the inevitable. If ever a man positioned himself with the maximum potential to fly as he launched into the abyss, it was Wynn. The deputy wasn’t wearing a cape and tights with a scarlet S emblazoned on his chest. Ultimately, he flew about as well as the laws of physics predicted.
He glanced off a branch on the way down. That helped him straighten out and get his feet under him for a landing that was a lot softer than it should have been because the snow was beginning to drift over the shrub where he hit. Judges at some extreme sporting event would have given him high scores, especially if they, like the Hornbakers, were unable to hear over the storm as his terrified scream trailed him to the ground.
The Heathers dropped on either side of him.
“You OK?” One asked.
“’Cause we’d better run!” Two explained.
Wynn was fine, and scared enough to turn in a dash time that would have impressed an NFL scout. He left the girls behind, but not the blizzard.
***
Except for where it was drifting behind the evergreens, the pasture hadn’t accumulated much snow. The winter-stunted grass wouldn’t hold more. The wind took the rest and went searching for a snow bank to invest in that might keep it safely deposited until spring.
The sheriff had lived at or regularly visited Mad Dog’s place all his life. He knew it in all its aspects, even smudged by a driving snowstorm. He’d noticed the drift that didn’t belong in his brother’s pasture. They were missing three people, and the drift’s size was too close to human for him to ignore, even though the chairman had told him what was there. He left the chairman and Judy in the car, just short of Mad Dog’s driveway, while he went to check. He’d expected an argument from Judy. He’d thought he might have to take her along, only the lump in the pasture was so obviously not alive that she’d stayed behind, uncharacteristically silent and obedient.
The snowdrift wasn’t human. It had hooves, and, when he brushed at it, revealed a great rusty stain where blood had gushed, thickened, then frozen, from the bullet wound that had killed the last buffalo in Benteen County.
“It’s Buffalo Bob,” the sheriff told the radio.
“Who would kill Mad Dog’s hand-raised pet?” The walkie-talkie was hard to hear over the wind. He couldn’t tell, though he thought the comment came from Mrs. Kraus. He’d used the radio to alert the office to this extra-vehicular activity.
“Mr. Chairman,” the sheriff continued. “Get your gun out and ready. Let Judy drive so your hands are free. We know this didn’t happen recently. All the same, somebody with a high-powered rifle could be waiting up at the house. I’ll circle around to the barn, come on the house from the back while you drive in from the front. I’ll call you again when I’m in position.”
“Understood,” the chairman answered.
The sheriff let the wind shove him toward the barn. Mad Dog’s house was hardly visible behind a screen of snow-capped lilacs and forsythia.
&nbs
p; The drifts near the barn were deep enough to cause problems. The sheriff finally reached its back door by circling some and wading through others. He was breathing as hard as if he’d finished his usual four-mile run when he slid one side open and stepped into the relative stillness of the barn’s dark interior.
It wasn’t any warmer inside, except for wind chill. Temperatures far below freezing weren’t ideal for olfactory impressions, but the sheriff recognized the coppery scent the moment he closed the door. Mad Dog had turned the stalls along the south wall into pens for his rescue wolves. Someone else had turned them into an abattoir. It was hard to take, even though he had known what to expect.
The sheriff knew several ranchers who feared those wolves enough to react this violently if their stock had been slaughtered by loose dogs or coyotes. He couldn’t imagine even one of them taking Mad Dog’s buffalo too. This had a taste of personal vengeance to it, or maybe madness.
The sheriff made his way to the other end of the barn. The yard behind Mad Dog’s house was as empty of life, but less violently so. No bodies, living or dead. No vehicles. No indication anyone was home.
“I’m going in,” he told the radio. “You too, but come ready.”
Judy came like one of those stunt car drivers at the fair, sliding the Cadillac to a stop by the walk to Mad Dog’s front door so the bulk of the vehicle was between the house and Chairman Wynn as he jumped out and leveled his pistol across the hood. It was a more impressive approach than the sheriff was accustomed to getting out of his deputies, but unnecessary.
The house was as empty as it looked, and it, too, was a victim of the sick violence that had visited Mad Dog’s barn and pasture. Most of the windows were broken. The front door had been kicked to splinters. Furniture was overturned, appliances broken, bookcases toppled. Books had been hurled about as if they could feel the same emotions they might impart. It didn’t make sense. Neither did the frozen red swastika someone had drawn on the kitchen floor. At least it wasn’t blood, just the contents of a broken ketchup bottle.
***
“I had a bison calf,” Mad Dog said. “There was something wrong with it. Back legs weren’t right. It couldn’t stand and it bawled all the time. I knew better, but I tried to nurse it, keep it alive. Finally, I had to do what I should have done at the start.”
Doc Jones rolled his eyes. “You trying to equate putting down a calf with murdering a child? Jesus, Mad Dog! I’m not asking you for absolution. I know what I did and I’m past trying to hide or deny it. I’m ready to face up to it.”
Mad Dog leaned down and put his face right in Doc’s. It shut him up. “Enough mea culpas, already. You aren’t listening to me. What I figured out, finally, was that calf’s spirit wasn’t right. It wasn’t really a buffalo. Maybe it got crossbred with some beef cattle. Anyway, what I mercy killed never had the chance to be a buffalo. That’s what happened with you, too, isn’t it? You did an autopsy on that baby. What did you find? Was it normal?”
“Normal is a broad term…” Doc tried to back away but Mad Dog pinned him against the wall.
“Was it a person who could have lived?”
“There’s no way I can be certain.”
“Yes there is, Doc. Just like I know that skull I brought you is Cheyenne, you knew that baby wasn’t right. You just won’t let yourself admit your occasional insights are every bit as valid as your scientific tests. Psychic diagnosis isn’t something you’re ready to accept. I know you, Doc. You wouldn’t have done whatever you did unless it was necessary. And I can tell. Call it Cheyenne mysticism or psychic mumbo jumbo from the local nut case, but I know you found something in that autopsy to justify it.”
“But I couldn’t have known then…”
“But you did. What was it, Doc. Tell me.”
“It’s rare. There were hardly any of the usual external indications.”
“It had no soul, did it, Doc?”
“What’s a soul? Where do I find it? Aw shit, Mad Dog. I don’t know what to say. It was an anenceph baby. There was a brain stem that might have kept all the involuntary functions going if I’d let them get started, but not much else. The rest of the brain didn’t develop properly. God! I suppose, if there is a soul, the brain is where it would live.”
Mad Dog pushed himself back across the hall. Doc had his personal space again, except inside. It still felt like whatever was Mad Dog, his spirit maybe, was pushing that same part of Doc. Manipulating him.
“No human died here,” Mad Dog said. “If someone had, I’d feel it. There would still be something left. You recognized that absence of humanity too.”
“Maybe I knew,” Doc admitted in a whisper, “but how can you?”
Not manipulating, Doc realized, guiding. With that understanding, the pressure receded.
“Same as any shaman, Doc,” Mad Dog smiled. “Same as you.”
***
They ran west, because that was the way Wynn Some happened to be pointed, and it was away from the house.
A Hornbaker was in the driveway to their right. He fired a shot in the air. Wynn didn’t seem to notice. The girls couldn’t hear the report because of the wind. When he didn’t aim at them, they stayed on course and followed the deputy.
He used the limb of a handy hedge tree to vault the fence and get into the pasture. Heather English followed suit, but she had to stop and help her sister disentangle her jeans from the top row of barbed wire. By then, Wynn was out of sight. But his tracks weren’t, though the wind was trying to scrub them away.
The girls pursued them until the prints came to a skidding halt about a hundred yards from the fence, then changed direction, going southeast even faster. His new course was paralleled by the tracks of what must have caused his change of direction. Wynn had encountered something massive enough for its hooves to excavate chunks of snow and frozen earth.
“What do we do now?” Two asked One, who didn’t know. All she knew was that they couldn’t stay out in this weather long.
“We can’t catch Wynn.” She gestured at the hoof prints, “And I don’t want to find what made those. Let’s circle back toward the farm from the north. If that guy with the gun is following us, he’ll have to make a choice. Maybe he’ll follow Wynn instead of us. Whatever, we’ve got to find shelter, or transportation. It’s miles to another farm. We’ve only been outside a few minutes and I’m already getting numb.”
Heather Lane nodded. “You’re the native. You lead, I’ll follow.”
“That could be a mistake,” One muttered, but she turned into the wind, lowered her head, and started jogging.
***
“Where do you live, Mary?”
Mad Dog sat on the floor in a modified lotus position. He wasn’t quite flexible enough to get both legs where they were supposed to be without cramping up. That sometimes hindered his efforts to meditate. Actually, it wasn’t exactly meditation, since he’d switched from yoga to Cheyenne shamanism, but there were similarities. What he was usually trying to do from the position these days was relax, free his spirit from his body so it could travel through time and space and commune with other Cheyennes, past and present, or visit the pantheon of beings who saw to it that the universe remained in order and operated as it was meant to. It took a lot of patience, something Mad Dog was trying to acquire. Now he was only getting down to Mary’s level.
“I dunno.” She was kind of huddled up in the corner of the couch in Doc’s office, half hiding under the blanket Doc had spread over her. She had one of those I-think-I’m-drowning grips on the rough of Hailey’s neck. It wasn’t something Mad Dog recommended with wolf hybrids, only Hailey seemed to recognize her need. It was like she had adopted the girl. When the grip threatened to get too tight, Hailey would just shift her head around and slather Mary’s face with kisses until the girl calmed down and loosened it.
That was the kind of patience Mad Dog yearned for, and, he suspected, the kind he needed just now. Mary was very young and her mind seemed even younger. There w
ere a lot of things Mad Dog wanted to know, things his brother needed to know. Doc too. Doc had collapsed in the chair behind his desk, swinging wildly on the pendulum of revelation between guilt and relief and doubt and wonder.
“Do you live on the farm where I found you?”
“I ’spose.”
“Who lives with you?”
She kneaded Hailey’s fur. “It changes. Most times, Gran’s there. Sometimes Gramps. And Uncle Simon, and Levi and Judah of course, and there’s the witch at the end of the hall.”
Witch at the end of the hall? What was real, what was fantasy? Gran would be Becky, Gramps, Zeke, he supposed.
“What about your mom?”
She shrugged, like she wasn’t sure what he meant.
“Where do you go to school?”
“I’d like to go to school.”
“Mary,” Doc interrupted. “Do you know a man named Tommie? Tommie Irons?”
Mad Dog had been avoiding Tommie’s name for a couple of reasons. He didn’t want to upset the girl, especially not before he got some useful information. And, he didn’t want to talk about the man he’d befriended, not if Irons had done to this girl the things he was accused of. Only she didn’t react.
“They don’t let me see anyone else.”
Doc was as stunned as Mad Dog. “Honey. You must know him. He lived there too.”
She nodded her head. “I knew him. Don’t tell, though, ’cause I wasn’t supposed to. He was nice, then he went away.”
Mad Dog wondered what nice meant.
“Who’s the father of your child, Mary?” Doc persisted. “Was it Tommie?”
She shrugged narrow shoulders and looked uncomfortable. “I dunno.”
Maybe Doc needed further evidence to support his wavering self-justification. Whatever, he wouldn’t let it alone.
“Honey. You’ve got to know. You remember where your baby came from. Somebody had to plant a seed in that same place before it could grow. It might have hurt when he did it. Surely you remember.”
