Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  “Oh, that. Yeah, I remember.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “Uncle Simon once. Then somebody else. A bunch of times. I thought I knew who it was then, but I wasn’t sure. So, I asked Gran. Sure enough, she told me I was right.” Mary beamed, delighted to be able to tell them what they wanted to know. “It was God.”

  ***

  “This is a Beretta.” Englishman handed Judy the pistol he’d taken from Simon that morning.

  “I don’t need to know who made it to shoot it,” she replied. She took it by the butt, dropped the magazine to ensure it was loaded, racked the slide, and dry fired it out one of Mad Dog’s shattered windows. One look at Mad Dog’s place and she was ready to carry a firearm after all.

  “Stubby little cartridges,” she observed.

  “That’s a 9 mm short.” Chairman Wynn was pleased to demonstrate his knowledge of firearms. “It’s not that potent. If you have to shoot somebody, do it more than once.”

  “Those hollow points will kill you quick enough at close range,” Englishman said.

  Judy nodded. She replaced the magazine and found a convenient pocket for the semiautomatic.

  “What’s all this about, Englishman?” Judy asked. “What are swastikas doing on a dead baby and Mad Dog’s kitchen floor? And what the hell has it got to do with where our daughters and Deputy Wynn are?”

  “You hear her, Mrs. Kraus?” Judy was surprised that Englishman had keyed the walkie talkie in time for her speech.

  “Enough,” the radio croaked.

  “Chairman Wynn, Judy, and I are about the same age,” Englishman told her. “We’re post-war boomers. The people saluting swastikas had already surrendered before we were born. I know some racists in the county, but I’m damned if I know any Nazis or white supremacists. How about you, Mrs. Kraus? Can you tell us anything?”

  “I ain’t that much older’n you,” she snapped, leading Judy to think she might be. This wasn’t a moment for injured pride. Judy took the radio from her husband’s hand.

  “Mrs. Kraus,” she pleaded. “Our kids are out there. Please help us if you can!”

  “Well, hell, Judy. I remember some German POWs worked at the agricultural station near Hays. And families here worried about sending their sons off to kill their relations. But there weren’t any Nazi sympathizers around Buffalo Springs. Not that I ever heard about.”

  “Any refugees come from Europe after the war?” Englishman wondered, taking the radio back. Judy found herself stumbling across the mess on Mad Dog’s floor. She nearly fell and that focused her attention on the book that had caused her to trip.

  “A Dutch family, real Dutch, from Holland,” Mrs. Kraus said. The wind made her hard to hear and it made the book’s dust jacket flutter.

  Judy bent down and picked it up. It was a history of the Second World War. Its jacket was covered with the flags of the combatants. There was something about Germany’s flag.

  “Isn’t Hornbaker a German name?” Mrs. Kraus asked.

  Judy carried the book over to the door to the kitchen. The ketchup swastika was beginning to smudge beneath a collection of snowflakes, but it was still as brutally intrusive as she remembered. And the other part was as she remembered too.

  “I think so,” the chairman said, “but Zeke’s no Nazi. He’s a horse’s ass sometimes, and he probably wouldn’t eat anything kosher unless it was a pickle. Look, if Zeke’s a racist, he’s not an organized racist. He doesn’t belong to anything more radical than the Farm Bureau.”

  “Englishman,” Judy said.

  He turned, but he didn’t come join her in the doorway the way she expected. He didn’t even ask what she wanted.

  “Englishman. I think you should come look at this.”

  “I’ve seen it, Judy, and we’re kind of busy right now.”

  He was being stubborn. It annoyed him when he thought she expected him to read her mind. And, she supposed, that was what she’d just asked of him.

  “No really,” she said. “This swastika. You need to look at it again.”

  Since their conversation with Mrs. Kraus was taking place on a mobile radio, there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t come. Englishman was stubborn, not stupid. And Chairman Wynn was curious enough to follow.

  “What about it.” Englishman was puzzled.

  She showed him the book.

  “The arms,” she said. “The arms on this swastika. They’re backwards.”

  ***

  “I can’t go much farther.”

  Heather English understood Heather Lane’s complaint. She couldn’t feel her feet anymore. That made running a problem.

  “You don’t have to. Look, there’s the fence.”

  And there it was, only a few feet away, hidden until that moment by swirling snow that only seemed to be getting thicker. Surely the storm would have to ease up soon. One snapped off a couple of branches to clear the way, then held the top strand of barbed wire while her sister scrambled over. A cluster of weathered outbuildings stood a few feet beyond the fence. They weren’t nearly as far north as she’d thought. On the other hand, they hadn’t been caught yet. That probably meant the Hornbaker with the rifle had followed Wynn’s tracks.

  “Which one?” Two asked, returning the favor with the fence.

  “It doesn’t matter. Any of them, just so we get out of this wind. We may have to try lots before we find a snug hiding place or a way out of here.”

  The nearest building was about a thirty foot square. Its windows had been boarded over. It had large swinging doors on the south end, big enough to drive a truck through, but impossible to open with more than three feet of snow drifted against them. There was a normal sized door on the north side. It opened out, against the wind. That made it difficult, but the wind had kept its approach swept clean. They forced it and found a room filled with dust-coated crates. The door slammed behind them, leaving them in dusky twilight.

  “I can hardly feel my hands.”

  Heather English almost wished she couldn’t feel hers. They ached from the cold. She was afraid that not feeling them, as was the case with her feet, might mean frostbite was near. She tried blowing on the former and stomping on the latter as she began exploring the interior of the building.

  Her eyes were adjusting. There was a large, boxy form over near the other doors. It took a minute, but then the familiar green and yellow, and the massive lugged wheels, began to make sense. It was a tractor, an old John Deere with small, tricycle-type front wheels and a cab around the driver’s seat. “Wow!” she said. Here was a possible means of escape, complete with weatherproofing.

  “Can you drive it?”

  One of Two was a town kid, but it wasn’t a big town. She’d driven old tractors like this before. Well, steered.

  “Of course I can drive it.” She was pretty sure she could. It wasn’t like you had to shift this manual transmission. You just found a gear going the direction you wanted and then let out the clutch.

  She climbed into the cab. The key was in the ignition. She lowered herself in the seat and began examining the controls. She found neutral, pulled on the choke, and turned the key. It cranked over slow—on a day like this, the oil was probably thick and viscous—but it cranked over steady. What it didn’t do was start, or even try.

  “You’re doing something wrong,” Two complained.

  She was pretty sure she wasn’t. She climbed out of the cab and examined the metal casting that was the engine. There was no neat little screen to check for details about this operating system’s fatal error.

  Heather English was no mechanic, but she’d helped her dad do simple automotive chores for years. She knew the basic workings of an internal-combustion engine. “The gas goes through a carburetor or injector,” she explained, “gets turned into mist, sucked into a cylinder and compressed by a piston, then a spark plug ignites an explosion that drives the piston down and turns the crank, and otherwise gets the show on the road.”

  “Like, what every girl
needs to know.”

  The gas was there. She could smell the unburned fumes pumped from the exhaust stack. That left spark.

  And then she saw it. The wire that went from the coil to the distributor cap was missing. Without it, they weren’t going anywhere.

  She went over and looked on top of a row of big crates. Maybe it had been set aside by someone interrupted in the middle of a tuneup. The crates were bare, except for simple labels. She bent and read one, curious. It didn’t make sense. JESUS—AUTOGRAPHED PHOTOS. Before she could begin to react to that, the other Heather interrupted her.

  “Uh, I think I found something.” She didn’t sound happy about it.

  “What?” Heather English wondered, still curious how Jesus could have autographed his photos, much less posed for them.

  “Here, wrapped in these blankets.”

  It looked like a rug. “Like that’ll be more interesting than what I just found,” One of Two countered, still peeved by her sister’s comment about her internal combustion lecture.

  Only it was. It was neatly packaged and propped in the corner, frozen solid as a popsicle. It was Tommie Irons.

  ***

  “Maybe we got us a dyslexic Nazi,” Chairman Wynn suggested.

  “Or maybe it’s that way on purpose.” The sheriff threw an arm around Judy’s shoulder and led her back into the living room. “Mad Dog had a shelf of old fiction and poetry over here somewhere. There were some Kipling books. You remember.”

  Judy did. “Yeah. The Light That Failed, a couple of collections of poetry. You’re right, there were swastikas all over them.”

  The chairman was confused. “Rudyard Kipling was a Nazi?”

  Judy found one. A piece of brittle leather had been torn off, but the crucial part was there. “These swastikas are the same as the Germans’.” She sounded surprised and disappointed, but she handed the book to Chairman Wynn all the same.

  “The bedroom,” the sheriff said. He led the way down a hall strewn with towels and bedding.

  The sheriff continued as they went, “Kipling was before the National Socialists. Look at the publication date. It’s what, maybe First World War. I thought Kipling’s swastikas might aim the other direction too, but that’s not the point. They’re proof that swastikas were around long before Hitler made them a symbol of evil. Kipling latched onto his in India—for good luck, I think.”

  Whoever had wrecked Mad Dog’s house was running out of steam by the time they got to his bedroom. A lamp and a chair had been knocked over, and something had been thrown through the window. Otherwise, the only mess there could be blamed on live-alone bachelor Mad Dog.

  “I don’t see how this helps,” Wynn said. “What’s any of this got to do with India?”

  The sheriff went to the cedar chest and opened the lid. It was right on top. He unfolded the blanket and spread it across the bed. It was red and black and gray and white in neat geometric patterns, and all four corners contained backward swastikas.

  “Not India,” the sheriff said. “This is a Navajo design from New Mexico. Native American—Indian—just like Mad Dog has decided to be.”

  ***

  “It was God? What do you make of that?” Mad Dog asked Doc.

  “Why don’t you just touch her, the way you did that skull? Do your Cheyenne version of a Vulcan mind meld. Then you’ll know.”

  Doc was being cynical again, but Mad Dog realized it was something he hadn’t tried. He’d carried Mary in and out of the jail, and from the parking lot behind the Bisonte Bar to Doc’s office, but both of them were so wrapped up in coats and blankets that he wasn’t sure they’d made physical contact. Not that that should matter. He’d had a glove on when he knew the skull was Cheyenne. But he was still new at this. His powers weren’t as controlled as they should be, and he wasn’t that sure what he was doing. So, why not?

  He reached out a bare hand and then he was lying back against Doc’s desk while Hailey wiggled into his lap and nuzzled him with a cold, worried nose.

  Doc was kneeling beside him and taking his pulse and Mary was looking at him with big, startled eyes. “Are you OK Mr. Mad Dog?”

  “You had anything to eat today?” Doc did a touch and go on the other side of his desk and came back with a blood pressure cuff. “Might be your blood sugar.”

  “I’m fine,” Mad Dog reassured them. Hailey was the only one to appear convinced, but he scrambled to his feet without wobbling and that counted for something in Doc’s professional opinion. Something, but not enough.

  “You passed out there for a second. Sit down somewhere and let me check you out. Any numbness on one side of your body?”

  “I didn’t pass out, Doc. I did what you suggested. I touched her with my hematsooma, my spirit.”

  Doc looked doubtful. “Now don’t go all supernatural on me here, Mad Dog.”

  Mad Dog reached up and put his hand on his forehead. “I wasn’t in here for a few seconds. I was…Well, I’m not sure where I was, but I’ve got to go. She’s right, you know. There is a witch at the end of the hall.”

  ***

  “Why Tommie Irons’ place?” Chairman Wynn wanted to know.

  “You got a better suggestion?” The sheriff glanced into the pasture where the dead bison lay. It was nearly invisible, now, covered by a fresh coat of snow and smoothed into an Arctic landscape by the ceaseless wind.

  “No, but…I mean, we’re looking for our kids, right? What makes you think they might be there?”

  The sheriff could feel Judy’s eyes boring into the back of his neck as he considered the question. He wasn’t sure he had a good answer. “I don’t know where else to look. This is where they would have come after they ended up in that ditch. The girls would have known where they were and how far it is to anyplace else.”

  “But what the hell were they doing out here in the first place?” the chairman demanded, turning out of the driveway into the space that now required a bit of faith to be called a road.

  The sheriff shrugged. Judy surprised him with an answer.

  “I might know,” she said. “Englishman, the girls have been pestering you for a car which, with their insurance rates, you said we can’t afford right now. Only you said you’d let them have your truck some of the time, and you’d start driving the black and white once they learned how to handle a stick shift.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But you never found the time to teach them. The Taurus is an automatic. They can drive it, only I’m always using it. Maybe they persuaded the deputy to give them a lesson in the cruiser. It’s a four speed, the same shift pattern as your truck, less one gear.”

  It made sense, he thought. “Only why today?”

  “Bad luck, maybe,” she offered. “And they’re sixteen. They’re immortal. It’s just snow. What kid doesn’t like to play in the snow?”

  “Could be,” the chairman said, guiding them through the first intersection on the way back to the highway. As the crow flew, the Irons place was closer by another route, but crows, and everything else, were grounded for the duration. “My boy’s a kid at heart too. It’s just the sort of foolishness he might get involved in. Only I still don’t get why the Irons place?”

  “Mad Dog annoys lots of people,” the sheriff said. “He gets a kick out of it. Some of them he annoys a lot. But I can’t think of anyone who’d do that to his place and his animals, not without provocation. ”

  “I don’t know if it’s a link or not, but Simon and Levi Hornbaker were at the Sunshine Towers as soon as they heard Tommie was dead, hunting for something they said had gone missing with Tommie’s body. It was valuable enough for Simon to pull a pistol on me. And we’ve got a dead baby on Doc’s doorstep. Benteen County, where nothing more serious than a little drunk driving ever happens, suddenly has all sorts of odd things going on.”

  “And Mad Dog’s square in the middle of all of them,” Judy said.

  The sheriff nodded. “Not just Tommie’s body and the missing heirloom. That backwa
rd swastika on Mad Dog’s floor was a message to him. It links him to the dead baby, since it had a swastika on its forehead. Also backwards, if I remember right.”

  The chairman was too busy trying to find a safe path to argue, but the sheriff could see him shaking his head.

  “I know,” the sheriff said. “None of it proves anything, only everything seems to be linked to Mad Dog somehow, and Mad Dog’s involvement started with Tommie Irons. So, we start there too, at Tommie’s place. That’s where Mad Dog took his body. I’d bet on it. Remember after the truck explosion, when he told you he was building a burial mound?”

  The left side of the Cadillac dipped and Chairman Wynn had to fight to get it back out of the edge of the invisible ditch. “Makes sense, but there’s no indication the kids ever got to Mad Dog’s. The storm’s bad enough, maybe they tried a short cut and…”

  The chairman trailed off and Judy turned away to stare into the storm. The sheriff didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to follow that thought to its obvious conclusion.

  It didn’t help when they barely managed to spot the cruiser on their way back to the highway. It was nearly hidden, just one more snowdrift among many.

  ***

  Swavastika! That’s what the design was called when the arms were reversed, Mrs. Kraus remembered. What she couldn’t recall was why she knew that. It was sort of a backwards senior moment. This time she had the answer but couldn’t remember the question.

  She’d only been six when Germany surrendered. And it wasn’t like any of her family had served. Her dad was too old and her brother was just a baby. Her cousins were all girls.

  Floyd was old enough to have served, though. Floyd Kraus, her dear departed husband, had been 4-F because of the heart problem he never thought was all that serious until the day it killed him. She’d married Floyd before she turned twenty. She’d felt so grown up, hooking a guy more than twice her age. And it turned out to be a pretty good marriage for the eleven years he lasted. Sometimes at night she still rolled over and reached for him.